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Comment by etagate | Hacker News Reader

This is true even for a torrent btw. And (un?)fortunately you can distribute anything on IPFS as long as it's encrypted.

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No one is going to pin encrypted data they do not understand. And IPFS doesn’t get users to seed random files, you only seed stuff you downloaded. So really it’s not much different to hosting it on a personal http server except any downloaders can also host.

Sounds very similar to bittorrent itself

> No one is going to pin encrypted data they do not understand.

Select users who have the decryption key (communicated out-of-band) might be willing to pin the encrypted data for the benefit of others who also have the key. There are also for-pay pinning services who probably wouldn't care whether the data was encrypted. And whether it's pinned it or not, as long as it's downloaded the data remains available to be shared (at least until it's GC'd).

Ok but you could do that on literally any platform. I could encrypt data and stick it on google drive or aws and the hosts wouldn’t have any clue what it was.

Sure, but doing it through IPFS means that you aren't dependent on a particular centralized service. If you put the encrypted file on Google Drive or AWS and then later take it down, the link breaks. Or someone might edit the file so that the link no longer gives the same content. On IPFS the original link continues to work as long as anyone has the file, and the content is immutable, so there are some advantages compared to plain HTTP.

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