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Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was a version of IPFS that distributed popular files as the swarm demands. Any singular person doesn't have whole pieces and doesn't know what they are distributing. Also when you help the swarm you get a crypto token of some sort, giving people a financial incentive to help the swarm.

So you would say I have 16TB, feel free to use it as you see fit swarm. I can "mine" crypto by helping the swarm.

The swarm benefits from a gigantic pool of storage and content.

ISPs and government agencies can't do anything because it's all anonymous and any individual person is sharing encrypted pieces of a file anyways.

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Minus the cryptocurrency part, Freenet has been doing this for 22 years https://freenetproject.org/

People keep mentioning the financial incentive as either something to take issue with and combat the entire system, or as something to hold up as a feature which can save a project.

Perhaps both have some point; however, I don't see it really necessary at all for a very useful and thriving project to benefit from something like IPFS.

Case in point - DVC.

You don't need financial incentive for people to store ML models / weights on their computers - they need to use them there anyway. It makes great sense that the more popular the model, the faster it should load from more nodes serving you, rather than waiting for things to be downloaded from the one server the authors put it on (that will probably be deleted in a year or so anyway).

> ISPs and government agencies can't do anything because it's all anonymous and any individual person is sharing encrypted pieces of a file anyways.

Note that there is no (happy to be corrected) publicly available IPFS implementation that can be run reasonably anonymous. Trying to tunnel kubo (go-ipfs) over Tor or other proxies will break stuff. There's also a bunch of fingerprinting that is not possible to disable without modifying source.

The answer to HA IPFS seems to be "just run more nodes". I am yet to speak with someone who has tried and reached success with load-balancing IPFS using available load balancers.

> ISPs and government agencies can't do anything because it's all anonymous and any individual person is sharing encrypted pieces of a file anyways.

It would need to be over Tor or similar, which is of course way slower. Otherwise there's nothing preventing "ISPs and government agencies" from going after people sharing copyrighted bits.

>So you would say I have 16TB, feel free to use it as you see fit swarm. I can "mine" crypto by helping the swarm.

The problem is that cryptocurrency mining is about producing verifiable proofs. I don't know how you would go about producing a proof that you've helped the swarm in a decentralized, sybil-proof way.

For me, costing my ISP more money is sufficient incentive to do something like this.

> ISPs and government agencies can't do anything because it's all anonymous

Same thing has been said about BitTorrent and Tor.

And yet governments have been able to de-anonymize file sharers.

Those who said that do not know the torrent protocol which is why the onion project even had to issue a statement on why using torrents over Tor is not secure.

https://blog.torproject.org/bittorrent-over-tor-isnt-good-id...

There is a project called Swarm that does exactly this.

https://www.ethswarm.org

(Disclosure: I am working on the project)

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