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Comment by koeng | Hacker News Reader

Is beaker going to support IPFS?

They used to, but they removed support. It makes sense to focus on just one protocol I think since they're such a lean operation. Also the guy running Beaker seems to be sort of anti-blockchain (describing himself as an "Unblockchain consultant") which might make them biased against it.

Also, IPFS urls change when the content they're pointing to changes, which makes them bad for decentralized web stuff. They are working on IPNS to handle this but I don't know what the status is.

IPNS has been working for a few years already. Both the dnslink and actual IPNS. However an instance of the IPFS daemon can only serve a single IPNS address.

The real problem with IPFS is that hosting a node requires a lot of bandwidth. I regularly tried to self-host an IPFSite but it makes make internet access literally unusable. So I abandoned that idea for good and now I use a free external service for that.

Actually, content-based addresses is really critical for decentralized web stuff - since you can't trust a single source to name data, and instead want many different parties to participate in the same global address space in a secure and trustless manner. Check out the dweb primer for why working with a base-layer built on content addressing is so powerful: https://flyingzumwalt.gitbooks.io/decentralized-web-primer/a...

IPNS is used by many groups to create a mutable layer over IPFS (it recently got much faster in our 0.5.0 release in April), but you can also use tools like Textile, OrbitDB, or other mutable databases built on IPFS.

I read that document and it seems to me like everything in there applies to Dat also, which isn't really content-addressed. But if IPNS is fast now it seems like it could be a good replacement.

> which might make them biased against it.

How is IPFS related to blockchain? On a technical level that is.

AFAIK IPFS is somewhat related to FileCoin which runs on "a blockchain". But not IPFS.

Or am I missing something?

Correct, IPFS is not a blockchain - while both are merkle-dags ('directed acyclic graphs' of hash-linked data), blockchains have all nodes sync the state collectively, while IPFS instead shards state across the entire network (such that each node maintains its own filestore).

Is IPFS blockchain based?

Nope - but used by lots of blockchains for things like off-chain storage (since having a content-addressable handle for a file that can never change is super critical for things like smart contracts)

Also the guy running Beaker seems to be sort of anti-blockchain (describing himself as an "Unblockchain consultant")

That's funny. I haven't checked them out, but I imagine its more the absurd hype (similar to AI) that annoys them rather than the technology itself.

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