Cloudflare Distributed Web Gateways: Unlocking the Web3 Metaverse | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare Distributed Web Gateways: Unlocking the Web3 Metaverse

blog.cloudflare.com

107 pointselithrar16 comments

> Cloudflare has an advantage that no other company in this space — and very few in the industry — have: a global network. For instance, content fetched through our IPFS Gateway can be cached near users, allowing download latency in the milliseconds. Compare this with up to seconds per asset using native IPFS. This speed enables services based on IPFS to go hybrid. Content can be served over the source decentralised protocols while browsers and tools are maturing to access them, and served to regular web users through a gateway like Cloudflare. We do provide a convenient, fast and secure option to browse this distributed content.

It's wild to see people who love the word "decentralized" also love it when an organization tries to centralize a something that's decentralized. It's really hard in these times to know if someone is trying to pump and dump for sure, or if they're being genuine.

The terminal state of successful decentralized technologies is always going to be one where there are some large centralized nodes. This is true for the Internet, for Email, for the Web, and so on. So consolidation of crypto by the backing of large mainstream companies is just one more sign that it’s here to stay.

If Cloudflare goes poof tomorrow though, IPFS will still work, albeit slower.

This view is not self-contradictory. It's possible to justify the statement that GitHub has been as much a net-positive to the software community as Git, although it's technically a centralisation of a decentralised system.

git has a narrow target market, which is developers. There's a high percentage of cloning, so if GitHub goes away all the data remains on people's machines.

Things that are supposed to be able to become mainstream have to expect different users. They need to expect a ridiculously high amount of e.g. Cloudflare usage. Most people aren't developers. And things like Cloudflare's gateway make it harder to sell "use this app that uses your phone's storage space to store things you like", because those cost storage space while Cloudflare is free. Sure, the systems can still be decentralized de jur, but de facto they are centralized. Git remains decentralized de facto due to the high percentage of git users who clone things.

GitHub's codespaces definitely are super centralized, and if they became mainstream, then I'd argue that git is centralized de facto.

Its not like that.... If you send you code to github, then deleted that code in our computer, and github goes down before any other person cloned your repo and decided not delete, then you code is lost.

You same question can be applied here: Why someone will download a random repo on the github and store just for fun? No one will do that without any reason. So, on git the only people that keep any file/repo offline, has any interest on that content to be hosted with then.

The same here, if I send any file using IPFS, the same file will be accessible using any gateway, my own gateway, my neighbor, or some other that i dont know who owns in other part of the globe.

The gateway is just a gateway. Its one way to find some asset on the network, and has a optional cache. Months ago I send one file using IPFS, then accessed via cloudflare (and others) gateway, then I deleted my file, and in few hours the file was inaccessible in every gateway that i tested. No gateway keep you file forever....

But then can if they want, anyone can keep any block if they want. So, the same way as my previous example using git! The asset will exists util everyone that hold that asset want to keep, but because you cant control the others nodes, once some asset is public over the network, thats can be "forever" or just few hours.

So... IPFS is more about in how you can share assets privately than the lifetime of the object. And with or without cloudflare IPFS is decentralized because at any point i can setup any gateway that can listen my assets in the same way (same hash) than any other gateway.

IPFS gatway is much more about node discovery + cache.... No centralization happens here. You can store third party blocks in you node if you want, or rely on other nodes if want, but thats is up to you. Its the same as upload anything to any cloud then delete the local copy.

> It's wild to see people who love the word "decentralized" also love it when an organization tries to centralize a something that's decentralized.

I don't think that's a good description of what's happening here.

IPFS content accessible via Cloudflare's gateway isn't dependent on Cloudflare itself at all. They're just acting as another equal peer in the network (albeit a widespread & well-connected one). If Cloudflare disappears, the content remains.

It's exactly like a large organization providing extra seeds for a popular torrent - it doesn't take anything away from the rest of the network.

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it totally different from a large organization seeding a torrent, because everyone downloading data from them is also likely seeding the torrent too while downloading it, while anyone using the gateway is not also storing any info on their machines?

Won't this gateway make it less likely to have some sort of p2p app take off, because why help out peers at your expense when you can get what you want from Cloudflare at no expense? Or maybe I'm looking at IPFS wrong - I interpret it as something meant to become popular (meaning much more non-programmers would use it than programmers), but I suppose if it remains a small community like torrenting, then it could remain effectively decentralized despite Cloudflare's gateway, because of how many users are being peers instead of solely leaching

This indicates that Cloudflare are publicly announcing and soliciting application for beta access to their IPFS and Ethereum (JSON RPC) gateways. This is incredibly exciting, and, coupled with the recent R2 announcement, suggests they are very much going to be disrupting existing spaces AND defining new markets (as the Stratechery article also recently posted on HN also describes).

Bullish on Cloudflare :)

Many are missing what Cloudflare is doing. They are taking over every aspect of the web and beyond. I see their market cap being $300B in less than 5 years easily.

What would be cool is to hook the Lightning Network up to NGINX to implement 402s with micro Bitcoin payments, in exchange for content or processing of some ML thing.

The response code has literally been sitting there all this time, waiting for an implementation of crypto for access.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402

https://lightning.engineering/posts/2020-03-30-lsat/

Check out LSAT https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28459713

The "Semantic Web" is crying about having its Web 3.0 moniker stolen by blockchain

So, it seems like you'd still need to use metamask (or similar) to store your keys and sign transactions. Then metamask (or similar) could call cloudflare to publish the transaction.

Metamask is a giant pain for new users. I was hoping this would somehow get rid of it. Perhaps the browsers could integate this functionality.

> Unless you happen to hang out with the Web3 community in Hong Kong, San Francisco, and London

Pretty funny. I'm sure NYC and Seattle have blockchain dev scenes than London. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_technology_centers#Glo...

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