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Comment by openfuture | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone knowledgeable that can tell me the difference between

IPFS, GNUnet, Zeronet, freenet or even something like i2p, tor and urbit .. as well as probably others.

Actually I know this question is asked all the time and I do know how these differ, to some extent at least, but I just don't understand why there are all these competing standards since it's all driven by the same-ish vision.

Whenever someone accomplishes this vision though it'll be a huge game changer. IPFS feels closest to it as of now .

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super tldr...

ipfs and zeronet (and dat project) are distributed file stores (think bittorrent), some have some special browsers n top that let you build applications

freenet is a distributed, secure content network.

i2p and tor are secure overlay neworks - run on top of the existing internet to provide secure connectivity - designed to obscure where traffic is going to and from.

gnunet and cjdns are also secure overlay networks but more like point to point vpns.

I'm actually reading the paper...

> GNUnet is an overlay network, as it is initially supposed to primarily operate over the existing Internet network. However, GNUnet does not assume that this is always the case. For example, GNUnet can also operate directly over WLAN or Bluetooth to create an ad-hoc wireless mesh network, and with the GNUnet “PT/VPN” subsystems we can run TCP/IP over GNUnet. So in this configuration, GNUnet would be an underlay network, a bit like MPLS or B.A.T.M.A.N. [NAL07]. In reality, we in fact expect to see both at the same time: some peers will run over the existing Internet, while others may connect to GNUnet on Layer 2.

ah yeah, youre right. cjdns has that too, you can build mesh networks with it:

https://tomesh.net/build-a-node/

Thanks for mentioning 'Dat Project', hadn't heard of it before. Do you know if any of these distributed file stores are making use of this[1] result like Pijul?

It'd be amazing if these projects converge on making version control, package management and any sort of information distribution (internet) into the same thing. Currently it feels like they are all working in separate corners on what they consider to be 'the abstraction that will eat the world' so to speak..

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.3903

GIT would come closest. Note that while it's not common now (aside from some first canaries, like scuttlebutt), GIT works perfectly fine as a P2P opennet. You are much less trapped on github, because you can just take your repo and the complete history in it anywhere you want - be it central server, or some sort of P2P overlay.

Isn't Darcs based on some kind of "theory of patches" too? That was the whole selling point versus Git, that Git takes snapshots and calculates diffs, while Darcs takes diffs and calculates snapshots.

This is quite a helpful tldr! Thanks!!

> IPFS feels closest to it as of now.

I'm rather skeptic. IMO, IPFS is just overengineered bittorrent. At the lowest layer, the semantics are the same, except with really bad ideas thrown into the mix - wantlist instead of bitmaps, forcing DAG in places where there's no use for it, all driving overall performance of the network into the ground.

AFAIK you can't get sued because you accidentally are hosting a fragment of copyrighted material over IPFS, whereas seeding coyprighted material over Bittorrent is a crime in the USA.

What do you mean "accidentaly"? You either have the file pinned, or not. If its not pinned, you're not seeding anything. If it's pinned, you're liable same as with BT.

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