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Comment by bblb | Hacker News Reader

We need a version of Freenet, where the network _guarantees_ that your content is always highly available. Well, at least as long as the tech/network itself is still alive.

Every user of the network has to provide some storage for the network itself. If there's not enough storage to safely store your new content on the network as highly available, the network would just say sorry, can't do right now, please wait on the line while we get new storage (users).

Sure, it would need some massive network effect to work at scale, but we have now, what, billions of devices connected to Internet? That ought to be enough.

I never really understood this current "decentralized" tech. Decentralized hashes with centralized gate keepers, and mixed with "old school SPOF tech", e.x. the VPS's that store the actual content. wat.

edit: 10GB per device/user and 1 billion devices. That's 10 exabytes. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10GB+*+1+billion

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> Sure, it would need some massive network effect to work at scale

And nobody wants to participate. These projects are doomed to be extremely niche. As TFA points out, even nerds do not want to run their own servers at this point.

It could have worked in the days of casual piracy (kazaa, napster, certain private torrent sites etc had a shitton of users) if you managed to sell it as a way to do exactly that..

But getting people to install apps today to donate their bandwidth and disk space for.. what cause? Let alone when they figure out that gasp your storage may then be used for illegal material. Nah, it just doesn't work.

>Nah, it just doesn't work.

This is why we can't have nice things. :D

>your storage may then be used for illegal material

Then forget about the anonymization features of Freenet, and build something that ties to your Google Auth, Facebook ID, Government ID, whatever.

And let LEA access all of the content and seize/prosecute illegal content. Really not that different than storing your content on any of the cloud storage providers. With the exception that your data would be always guaranteed to be highly available, and not on just one or two centralized cloud storages.

>But getting people to install apps today to donate their bandwidth and disk space

That's just a marketing headache. ;)

> And let LEA access all of the content and seize/prosecute illegal content. Really not that different than storing your content on any of the cloud storage providers. With the exception that your data would be always guaranteed to be highly available, and not on just one or two centralized cloud storages.

It’s not that simple: if you host anyone’s content, you’re taking on personal risk (do you want to have to convince law enforcement that the pirated Disney movie or child pornography served from your home IP was served entirely without your knowledge?), giving up your resources (“Netflix is slow, turn off the mirror and see if it gets better!”), and getting slower performance/reliability (e.g. why OpenSea uses GCP instead of IPFS) immediately in the hopes that it will at some point in the future become worthwhile.

Note also that cloud storage is centralized administratively but distributed for reliability. I would give very long odds that you’re more likely to lose data through random IPFS nodes disappearing / dropping your data than on S3, and if you have to run your own geographically replicated nodes it’ll cost more in your time until you have a very large amount of data.

Statistically nobody does that, and because P2P networks need to significantly over-provision to compensate for unreliable nodes it’s hard to get anywhere close to competitive. The Linux world has the freedom ethos, no concerns about copyright/malware/etc., and still few people torrent ISOs because it’s usually slower.

No, we don't. IPFS guarantees that the owner can host their own NFT forever (there are multiple pinning services if they don't want to run a server). This is the best possible model. If even the owner doesn't give a shit, why should anybody else?

It's true that most NFT buyers have zero idea how this works. In 2 years multiple shitty NFTs are going to turn into 404. This is fine - people will learn to only buy images that use ipfs.

>IPFS guarantees that the owner can host their own NFT forever

I always thought IPFS just as a BitTorrent but with blockchainy tech stack.

But if it can indeed guarantee that my content would always be available, then IPFS is the answer.

BitTorrent also guarantees that your content would always be available – if you're hosting it.

Your response is different from what I posted. You can always pin the image on your ipfs node and it's going to resolve to the same, unique, hash (well, unless preimage resistance of sha2 is broken...) allowing everyone in the world to download it. That doesn't mean it guarantees availability - nothing does - someone has to host it.

Ultimately, the owner has to host it, or pay someone to host it, or hope someone else hosts it. Although nfts are small enough that any semi-popular ones may stay alive potentially forever as long as someone, somewhere, hosts it on an ipfs node. Potentially long forgotten by literally everyone alive.

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