Be warned that IPFS is not anonymous, and the IP addresses of the nodes serving the content are quite easily obtainable.
And since the FBI already got involved and arrested people, this is quite the risky endeavor.
And since the FBI already got involved and arrested people, this is quite the risky endeavor.
I’m pretty disappointed they didn’t mention this in the article. If this gets any traction it will eat as much CPU and bandwidth you give it.
Running with Docker and limiting CPU is necessary along with a bandwidth limiter/policer/shaper.
Having run IPFS for a long while it also ends up in strange states and stops responding to requests. I’ve taken to using a monitoring system to GET a known CID and restart the IPFS container if it fails.
My bandwidth and hardware have 100% uptime but IPFS needs restart at least a couple of times a day on average (looking at logs).
In short: this isn’t practical.
TBH i love IPFS, and i wish i could get behind it and help.. but ever since they starting making Crypto i have moved away from it. I have no way of knowing if they're working on IPFS or if it's merely a means to a Coin.
Bandwidth limiting is not built in[1].
[0] - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10342470/process-nicenes...
It's just like running a webserver, but with content-based addressing, the possibility of having multiple machines provide the same content and much more convenient mirroring than over HTTP.
If you start an IPFS node, it'll remain empty until you upload something, or pin (copy) somebody else's content.
I think your node might also cache requests you make to it for some time, but that's also something that's a result of you asking for it.
In Freenet you contribute to a global pool of storage, and end up storing and transmitting whatever the network happens to need. Freenet is intentionally obscure about it. The archive is encrypted, there are no logs, there's no way to list what your node contains, and storage is probabilistic making it hard to determine if something is there because you asked for it, or it passed through your node.
Tor also tries something similar, and has premade explanations to give to authorities if they ask about your exit node.
But those are specifically built to try to work with that case. Stuff happens behind your back that you have zero involvement in besides providing a piece of infrastructure for the network.
In IPFS on the other hand you make a personal, intentional choice to mirror or upload something.
Tor nodes themselves also don't host any data.