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Comment by fxtentacle | Hacker News Reader

Actually, I believe that BitTorrent comes pretty close. The magnet links are just the SHA-256 hash of the content (in truncated). Anyone can link to such content and as long as at least one computer worldwide has the data stored and is online, you can still download it. Modern BitTorrent doesn't even need real trackers anymore, due to its distributed hash table of peers.

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IPFS works just like BitTorrent in this respect. The main differences are that IPFS has more affordances for serving files to browsers so websites could be hosted through it through a standard IPFS web gateway, and that Filecoin (a system for paying people to verifiably seed your content) integrates with it.

Many hash IDs that used to be in BitTorrent no longer are there. If you need certainty that your data is still there, BitTorrent does not deliver.

IPFS doesn't solve permanent data availability either, the closest to "solving" this is Arweave[1] but that comes with problems of its own. It's fundamentally impossible to correctly price the availability of a "service" in the far future.

[1]: https://www.arweave.org/technology

the problem with bittorrent is, if you seed n torrents at the same time. Thats n different pools to keep up to, n dhts to manage, and so on.. With ipfs you seed blocks (folders,files,content) and it does not matter how much, the inital overhead stays the same. e.g. apt could never use torrents due to the amount of small packages.

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