Hacker News Reader

Comment by moritonal | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame that this would have been a textbook case for using IPFS and yet that wasn't the default.

Books are naturally immutable, and could be structured into sub-categories whilst enjoying the benefits of deduplication.

View on HN

All of library genesis is already available on IPFS (see https://freeread.org/ and https://libgen.fun/dweb.html). Hopefully someone will import this collection into libgen and then these books can be on IPFS too.

Torrents are simpler and more efficient for distribution, but IPFS is better for accessing individual files.

IPFS doesn't really work well for this because you'd never know if the peer hosting the last subset of some books went offline (and you'd lose those until someone who had them came online again).

I want a slightly different system, which I've posted about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31972252

This is my point about the shame it isn't. It seems obvious that ipfs would have both privacy and a self balancing way to pin a partial set of data. But no, which makes it unsuitable.

What makes you think IPFS has privacy? It has the complete opposite, it is not designed for privacy at all.

When you pin files, you announce to the whole world which files you're hosting. When you download files, you announce to the whole world what you're looking to download.

That would paint a huge red target mark on filecoin's back, given that they raised over a quarter-billion. They would take it down faster than you can have an 8TB HDD shipped to you.

IPFS is a protocol like bittorrent. The only way to make content inaccessible is to go after the people/computers that are sharing that content.

They can't take it down.

They can and will use legal means to go after anyone trying to use the network this way in order to make the content less discoverable and discourage others from following suit.

Being coined as the Napster on Blockchain is the worst possible PR one can think of in their situation.

I suspect Russia could now help with this one :-)

But why would it, really? At this point it absolutely plans to rejoin world economy once things "blow over". And if becomes clear that it's not going to happen - there is even less reason to host some books in foreign languages that probably have "extremist" content in them.

Because they can; same reason anybody else might host it, except for Russia it's easier because you can ignore the law.

so you're telling me there's CSAM on IPFS that feds "can't" take down? Somehow I doubt that.

Somehow? How? Do you know how IPFS works? They can't take down torrents either.

But we were talking about filecoin raking something down from ipfs. They can't do it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com