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Comment by feanaro | Hacker News Reader

> There isn't much allure to it beyond "our hosting/CDN will be cheaper if we let the customers pay for it".

This is a very business/customer-centric perspective. What about resistance to censorship, ease of sharing without relying on central third-parties, resistance to linkrot of non-commercial content or even content from a business that went under, etc?

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Censorship resistance is illusory without any anonymity. It'd make me a little sad if anyone gets into IPFS because of its censorship resistance when freenet and tor hidden services already exist. The central third party is preferable to potentially anyone being able to start logging who is viewing a given piece of content.

I agree that anonimity is an important aspect of censorship resistance, in particular the avoidance of being easily targetted. However, avoiding single point of failures is just as important, and this is what IPFS (currently) solves. Eventually, Tor and/or i2p integration is likely to happen.

I don't think Freenet and IPFS mutually exclude each other, though. Freenet is a specialized tool with low usability. IPFS aims to be a core, widespread infrastructural protocol with high usability. In this way, I think they can co-exist and be complementary. The existence of a harder to use and more anonymous tool doesn't negate the usefulness of having a more widely used tool with lesser guarantees.

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