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Comment by thekyle | Hacker News Reader

It's a neat idea. Although, I'm skeptical of its practicality for hosting any serious amount of data.

If everything is hosted on the Bitcoin blockchain then every node in the Bitcoin network will need to keep a copy of every file uploaded. I would prefer the DHT model used by IPFS and DAT where each node only hosts part of the network.

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OP_RETURN data can be pruned, actually. Miners/node owners can decide for themselves if they want to keep the data; eventually a market will emerge for such a service, but for now the blockchain is small enough that it's not a problem.

In most cases, you don't even need a pruned node. https://github.com/interplanaria/bitbus

Nodes would be big server farms and preserve immutability by competing for block rewards. If you're running a Bitcoin application you don't need to store the entire chain, only the subset you need.

It's all about the incentives. What is the incentive in IPFS to keep data? If offering it to clients earns you money, what is the incentive to distribute it to competing peers? The blockchain is the solution: A miner must distribute the data in order to claim the block reward (subsidy + fees). Nodes can prune/drop any data they don't care about. You'll end up with specialised and competing nodes where each node only stores a subset of the data - some data might even be completely deleted or only available in archives if it has too little value.

Do you mean IPFS & DAT? There is also Webtorrent, GUN, SSB, etc.

Yeah, I made a typo. Fixed now.

opcode return data can be deleted by nodes at will, they will be as redundant as they are profitable to the storage provider.

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