Hacker News Reader

Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

Is there a way to install something on my local machine and host IPFS content to help "the swarm". If they combine this with some kind of crypto monetary incentive it would go a long way for people to help "the swarm".

Odysee is looking into adding crypto to your balance when you serve content that helps viewers.

View on HN

No. I tried. For weeks. Filecoin is the mechanism for this. And they do everything humanly possible to both technically keep the ecosystem open, while at the same time making it practically impossible for any non-data center vendor to take part.

The min hardware specs are absurdly large. Most of the services required are not prepackaged alum any way, the exercise is left to the implementer for almost everything.

If you don’t have 100k+ to drop in hardware, there’s no community help for you.

It’s a shame because ipfs is well structured from the other end, but it’s not really decentralized in any way other than naming.

Yeah I looked in to filecoin as well and it's not nearly as simple as setting up a raspberry pi with a 1tb HDD attached. You have to have a latest gen array of GPUs sitting there constantly cryptographically proving the entire content of the HDD every minute.

As with all crypto tech, its insanely inefficient and you may as well use google drive or s3.

Maybe FileCoin is what you're looking for? https://filecoin.io

Note that the system requirements are way out of the league of the average home user (32GB RAM, 8 cores, several TB disk space). Plus, if the chain is growing at 38GB/day (as the Filecoin website suggests), that’s a traffic average of 3.8Mbit/s 24 hours a day.

You could always download the IPFS Desktop client and "pin" content that you find valuable to provide to the community, (say, a partial copy of Wikipedia in your language [0]. No crypto-based incentives associated with that though, at least yet.

[0] https://github.com/ipfs/distributed-wikipedia-mirror#cohost-...

Wikipedia changes every second. That seems like a very expensive combination for a CAS system — even with good deduplification you’re storing a lot of metadata tracking every revision.

Is this legitimate or just a shitcoin scheme? The website looks very sketchy.

I've been following Filecoin for a while and although I'm not invested in it, some of their YouTube videos do have technical substance to them, and they seem to have some brand-name investors like the Winklevoss' org.

I think filecoin is legit but it’s not working super well in its current state

Reply on news.ycombinator.com