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Comment by fiatjaf | Hacker News Reader

My point is that chat messages are meant to be ephemeral, so it was a waste to store them in IPFS and hash them and make them identifiable by a unique useless hash in the entire world forever.

But since I posted the comment I realized that this is actually a cool feature for a chat app to have.

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When I choose to use a chat application, of my reasons to use it is so that there is an accessible record of the thing.

More concerning to me is with IPFS is privacy. I would want to encrypt it so that only my chat partner and I could read it. But then would it be interesting in enough to live for long on the network?

IPFS isn't in the business of providing storage for free to users. If you want it stored forever you should pin it or use a service that does the same. Just because the name is permanent doesn't mean the data is unless it's in demand from someone.

The name is misleading, you must concede.

What?

The name of a piece of data is cryptographically secure. It is permanent, but the data that is being named doesn't have to continue to exist on a hard drive just because its name exists.

The cool thing about unique hash per message is that it makes that message linkable in other applications, after all it's just an IPFS hash. So for example, if you share a file in Orbit, you can get that file with IPFS just like you would get it normally.

Linked data ftw! :)

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