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Comment by phantom_oracle | Hacker News Reader

I looked into this the last time someone posted about it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27551619

One thing I realized is how expensive Ethereum domains are. The domain price is equivalent to a regular domain and then you still have to pay the gas fee, which makes it more expensive than a casual .org or .net

The other drawback of these censorship-resistant blogs is that they all require plugins to access the non-HTTP domain, which all but rules out most non-technical people who don't even know what HTTP is.

And while it can still be accessed over HTTP, the bottlenecks become the same companies that might comply with censorship requests.

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It's all a matter of time. The plugins are a current workaround for when browsers don't natively understand IPFS content.

But the rate of growth of this space and with browsers like Brave gaining some traction, I won't be surprised if Firefox starts natively supporting Web3 tools at some point in the future and that would make Google and Apple think about it as well.

Definitely will take time but this seems like the logical next step given how far this tech has already come in the last 5 years.

How's IPFS on mobile? I'd expect it either eats battery or is slow. Maybe both.

> The other drawback of these censorship-resistant blogs is that they all require plugins to access the non-HTTP domain, which all but rules out most non-technical people who don't even know what HTTP is.

All .eth addresses are resolved by cloudflare with the .link tld, so hn.eth could be visited as a normal site with hn.eth.link

Until Cloudflare is required by law to unlink something.

I'm sure they do have a blacklist, and for those hiy can run the infrastructure yourself if you want to view those

If they are using HTTP without knowing what it is, then their understanding of protocols is quite possibly not the important part of the puzzle.

I'd struggle to explain what IFPS is but I can follow the link just fine.

There's a comparable stack using Skynet and HNS. HNS is a lot cheaper than Ethereum because it's a blockchain dedicated to domains, you aren't competing with things like yield farming or crypto kitties for block space. If fees are high, it's because a lot of people are buying names.

Skynet is different from IPFS in that everything is hosted by paid servers, and it uses direct routing instead of a DHT, so you get a lot better latency. Skynet's IPNS equivalent (called SkyDB) is also a lot faster, p999 on the order of 200ms to update something.

The other nice thing about Skynet is it's all http accessible. Anyone can run their own Skynet portal, and that portal by default serves over http. You can grab any content from any Skynet portal, and there's even an upgrade in development that will automatically find alternate portals for you if requests fail.

You might be dealing with outdated price information. I just picked a random available 6 letter domain "prider.eth" and it costs ~$5 a year with a ~$12 fee. That means you can register an "unstoppable" domain for a decade for ~$62 at this moment. $12 seems like a pretty reasonable fee for such a service.

Secondly, you need specialized software for HTTP, it's called a web browser. There are browsers that have (or will) have native eth/ipfs support. I think Brave already does out of the box. People will download whatever app their friends are using, even if they have no idea what's going on underneath.

The HTTP gateways for all this stuff are only so "legacy" tech can communicate to that world. It's a bridge, not a destination.

> And while it can still be accessed over HTTP, the bottlenecks become the same companies that might comply with censorship requests.

This is something that bothers me about the state of dapps right now. The way many of them connect to the blockchain is via Infura (a centralized service); even Metamask uses Infura to connect to the blockchain. There’s this abstraction that you trust, that you’re working with something totally decentralized, but right now the technical constraints necessitate single points of failure or censorship.

Of course, the data is still there in the blockchain, decentralized over many nodes, but the way we access that information seems very, very brittle.

This is very true. Like I said in another comment, the HTTP gateways are bridges, not destinations. It'll only take one or two bridge collapses before people wise up and move to sturdier ground.

This is true; but there are multiple entry points to that data (The Graph, Infura, etherscan, etc) and just because one fails does not mean the entire ecosystem will collapse (ie: you can easily create a new indexer and switch HTTP provider from Infura to NewInfuraReplacement), or even run your own node for your company.

You can access https version of an ENS website without plugins by using a `link` suffix:

https://pawelurbanek.eth.link/

>And while it can still be accessed over HTTP, the bottlenecks become the same companies that might comply with censorship requests.

As the OP said, you're just back to relying on a centralized service

Kind of. eth.link breaks the chicken and egg problem. Early adopters can stand up visible pages this way and provide signal to browsers for future inclusion by default.

Resources on the page at that URL still load from your .com domain - will Cloudflare serve those too?

Looks like I've left some absolute paths by mistake. They should also be served by IPFS.

Let’s say the entire internet switches over to this. Does it keep up in performance, does it slow down as use becomes ubiquitous - or does it become faster?

More people is actually an asset to protocols like IPFS because everyone who downloads the data also serves it to others, so actually the more popular something is, the easier it is to get.

Likewise with ENS, all the data is stored locally on your local copy of the chain, so it doesn't matter how many users are making queries because each one is only querying their own node.

Also users are serving files to each other in an offline-first ecosystem. From that perspective it could be faster and more reliable as well.

From the article,

> In addition to the cost of the domain ($5/year), you have to pay the gas fees.

Who does the $5/year go to? What incurs gas fees? Registration & updates? Updates are mentioned below:

> One downside is that each data update costs money, ~$1.5 at the time of writing.

Are initial gas fees higher?

Well I guess it depends on the current price of gas. I was playing around with ENS on Ropsten and I estimated it takes about 1/2 a million gas to buy an ENS domain. At current gas prices that's ~$30USD, but this time last year it would have been around $5. With the per year cost of the domain being $5 on ENS and About $12 on most of the registrars I looked at, it would have been better to go the ENS route (setting aside the gas cost of regularly updating the site, which I guess could also be avoided using IPNS, though it wasn't mentioned in the blog post so I am not sure about this).

One big issue here is scalability. If enough people start using ENS that gas price will go up significantly. Ethereum is fundamentally not scalable.

Not at present; sharding (part of Eth2) will change this scalability dramatically though.

A possible counter argument at least to the plugin problem is that having the people who don't even know what HTTP is joining the internet was part of what led to the censorship problem in the first place.

>which all but rules out most non-technical people who don't even know what HTTP is

This is why they call it web3. web1 had the same initial problems. Use Brave.

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