Web3.storage – Unlimited, free, decentralized data storage on IPFS | Hacker News Reader

Web3.storage – Unlimited, free, decentralized data storage on IPFS

web3.storage

18 pointsAkshatJ2714 comments

From the FAQ page:

> How can you offer this service for free?

>> Due to the cryptoeconomics of Filecoin, data storage is provided for free today. This will likely change to some form of crypto-native payment model in the near future (e.g., staking Filecoin to increase storage limits), but will remain highly inexpensive due to Filecoin's economic model and 15B+ PiB of capacity. Today, we do subsidize the cost of overhead of running Web3.Storage, but the goal is to reduce this as Filecoin continues to improve (e.g., faster storage and retrieval). Please see here for more on Filecoin economics.

This sounds like a bezzle to me?

> What happens if Web3.Storage is discontinued?

>> One major advantage of using Web3.Storage is its use of IPFS, making it easy to move to an alternative storage provider. All of your data is accessible via IPFS, and you can simply export all of your CIDs and ask a pinning service to pin them without need to download or upload any data. You have this option even if you use Web3.Storage today and just want another redundant copy of your data persisted. And you don't need to change the URLs that your application is pointing to, since IPFS URLs are content addressable.

>> We don't expect to ever discontinue Web3.Storage, but if we need to, we'll give you 90 days' notice for you to make the easy switch.

Switching providers by adding a “pin” to a new provider sounds pretty neat, actually.

> How can I delete items from Web3.Storage?

>> You can delete files listed in your account. Simply log-in to your account and use the file manager on the files page. It's currently not possible to delete files via the API or the client libraries, but we are working on enabling that feature in the near future.

>> However, once a file is uploaded to Web3.Storage, there cannot be a guarantee that all copies of the file are gone from the IPFS network. As soon as a file is uploaded, other IPFS nodes can access and store a copy of the data. The data only becomes unavailable when the last IPFS node has stopped pinning the file, and all copies are garbage collected. As a consequence you should only upload to Web3.Storage files that you know can be shared with anyone forever, or are securely encrypted.

Oh right. I hope you trust your encryption algorithms for all data forever, cuz your files may be under attack by offline adversaries in perpetuity!

https://web3.storage/faq/

I agree, certainly wouldn't use it for storing anything private. I wonder how effective IPFS would be, compared to something like torrents, for piracy.

“Trusted by the future”? What kind of hogwash is that - how do you gain trust from something that hasn’t happened yet? Even something like “Future proofed in the present” would be a better tag line.

The "how is this free" section doesn't actually explain how.

It is pretty clear from the FAQ that it is paid for by pixies and fairy dust.

I feel the service is somehow exploiting filecoin providers, it says they (the filecoin nodes) have a higher incentive to pin web3.storage files, rather than other files. However, its still not clear who is paying for the incentive.

"Today, we do subsidize the cost of overhead of running Web3.Storage..."

So it's free until it's not, like most things.

https://share.ipfs.io let's you share on IPFS directly.

> Because you're sharing directly from your device, it's important to keep this page open until the recipient downloads the files. If you're sharing with a group, others in the group can help you co-host the files by also keeping the share page open in their browsers.

You still need a pinning service to keep your files online, even after you close the page.

Interesting, this is blocked by CloudFlare's 1.1.1.2 malware DNS service:

    $ drill -Q @1.1.1.2 share.ipfs.io -> 0.0.0.0
    $ drill -Q @1.1.1.1 share.ipfs.io -> 209.94.78.1

Suppose it's probably a popular method to exfiltrate data for malware?

So it's a centralized service giving access to a decentralized storage, for convenience. Ok.

Congrats. You've just re-created Usenet's NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol)

why does anything related to blockchain have to be always a scam and please don't use word web3 it's not.

This is IPFS, what makes you think it is a scam?

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