Comment by friendzis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by friendzis | Hacker News Reader

I see two core problems with content addressable web:

  * Dynamic content
  * Private/sensitive information

Dynamic content on a distributed system poses rather hard challenges on data integrity - how would it be possible to ensure that different pieces of data you have are actually from the same [temporal] set? The very same HN - how would it be possible to see at least all the children of parent you want to comment to in a distributed manner? Anything I can come up with involves some sort of central dependency repository. Two child "commits" create branches in content tree. If these children are duplicates - we pick the better one and cast the other into abyss, the bigger challenge is how do we merge them together. This is a wide topic, so please excuse my brevity.

Private information is yet another rake to step on. I would really love my bank account information to remain accessible to me and the bank only. I don't even trust myself not to lose decryption keys, I don't trust long-term security of encryption algorithms (flaws could be found, brute forcing might become viable), therefore the information better stays in as little places as possible. Another end of this stick is authentication/authorization. Encryption does not work, because access rights change. What I'm authorized to view/do today might not be the same tomorrow. The only solution is not to serve the content in the first place. As for authentication I don't see a solution at all.

Although content addressable web is awesome solution for [more or less] static content - wikipedia, blogs, etc.

I see more core problems:

1) This only scales if enough people are willing to give up a portion of their storage devices. I would think twice about that for my SSDs.

2) Private customer internet connections often have a lesser upload bandwidth and that is part of the overall traffic calculation of ISPs. So the networks have to change a lot to face changing traffic requirements in this regard. That is something that will not scale with the demand of a successful protocol (see BitTorrent). Also this IPFS traffic may harmful to other traffic like gaming sessions.

3) Illegal content will be the killer. Don't expect laws to change for IPFS. No one will permanently use VPNs / anonymizers permanently for using IPFS, because some law firms will specialise on gathering endpoint information like they already do with BitTorrent.

1) The plan is to incentivise people with schemes like http://filecoin.io/

2) Yeah, I'll admit the asymmetric nature of home internet is a bit of a hassle. I suspect you'll still require machines on the backbone seeding content, with domestic machines focussed more on providing content to local peers and/or seeding rarely accessed content. In the long-term, IPFS can help ISPs in reducing their costs (content can be grabbed from within their own network, instead of having to peer with another network for almost everything), which might help to convince them to change.

3) IPFS doesn't force you to host any content you don't want to. If you choose to host illegal content, that's your problem.

> 1) The plan is to incentivise people with schemes like http://filecoin.io/

Adding a market to this problem is interesting and may work, indeed. But you must not forget, that most internet connectivity plans for private customers prohibit commercial use, where the network is the essential part of that business. If people start to make money on IPFS, the ISPs will not just watch. Another aspect of this is taxes that people must pay if they make a profit, and all the requirements to operate a business. With this in mind, I am skeptical that this will scale to a size where you can say: And now it is really a distributed thing.

> 2) Yeah, I'll admit the asymmetric nature of home internet is a bit of a hassle. I suspect you'll still require machines on the backbone seeding content, with domestic machines focussed more on providing content to local peers and/or seeding rarely accessed content. In the long-term, IPFS can help ISPs in reducing their costs (content can be grabbed from within their own network, instead of having to peer with another network for almost everything), which might help to convince them to change.

Many ISPs already do that. CDNs use ISP data centers to bring content to customers. In fact, IPFS is not much different from their solutions. But IPFS can be a standard for content distribution. That would be a good thing.

> 3) IPFS doesn't force you to host any content you don't want to. If you choose to host illegal content, that's your problem.

It is not always obvious what content is legal. Copyright laws will test IPFS hard.

1) Whilst it can be used to make a profit, it can also be used as a system to allow you to trade storage space on your own computer in return for replicating your own content on other people's machines. The more storage you provide, the more redundantly your own content is hosted on the network, and the longer you can still serve your own content whilst your own machine is offline. IANAL though, so I can't comment on the legal implications.

2) Sure, you can view it as a CDN anyone can participate in (including machines within your LAN).

3) There are plans for handling DMCA takedowns https://github.com/ipfs/gateway-dmca-denylist

Well, I am thrilled to see it succeed. To me the most interesting part is IPFS acting as a CDN standard. That could make an impact, certainly.

Their incentive idea is realistic, it will work.

My research team has build very similar operational systems over the past 8 years. "Decentralized credit mining in P2P systems", IFIP Networking 2015 "Towards a Peer-to-Peer Bandwidth Marketplace", 2014 "Bandwidth as a computer currency", news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/08/creating-a-computer-currency/, (PRE-Bitcoin), 2007

Their work is still early, essential thing about this type of approach is spam. You can often trick people into caching stuff. So not your typical DDoS anymore, but another resource eater. Plus there is the counterintuitive oversupply problem: <more citations to our own work> "Investment Strategies for Credit-Based P2P Communities"

> [...] Copyright laws will test IPFS hard.

Or the other way around...

You are already giving up a portion of your storage devices when you download something though. The data just sits in your browser cache, Downloads folder etc.

Actually BitTorrent effectively enables arbitrage between fast download bursts and giving back long slow uploads. You trade one for the other. Your fast download burst is a momentary aggregate of many slow uploads from other users.

Looks like currently IPFS is handling DMCA by having a centralised DMCA blacklist (voluntary). This should probably be solved in a more nuanced than that if IPFS really takes off but demonstrates it's not a killer problem.

Re your first question, see https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/40

In terms of revoking access rights, that's not really a problem unique to IPFS (cf. DRM)

That is only an issue if we throw out the current system altogether.

What do you think of embedding IPFS links within html? Secure content can be directly loaded from the central server, content that only needs to be checked for integrity or hidden from the local network can be loaded from the distnet.

It'd be like mushing torrents and the web together.

Integrating with the existing web is definitely one of the goals, see https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs.js

This way connection to origin server is still a SPoF without the ability to access ephemeral content. I think it would be a better (is it even in the realm of possibility?) alternative to do it the other way around: embed secure content inside Content Addressable Network (CAN). With Content Address you automagically get verification that at least the bank URI is intact. On top of that, CAN could aid in verifying root CA/server key pairs increasing TLS security. Well, at least for the duration of certificate validity. CRLs are again another story confirming that CANs, contrary to centralized ones (unless you are getting MITMed), have no way of indicating whether the content in question is current. On top of that, if majority of Alices direct peers are Malicious Malroys they have pretty good chances of convincing the network that Alice itself is acting maliciously and content updates from her are not to be trusted. Oversaturated example: Presidential elections with 49.9%/50.1% vote distribution.

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