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Comment by rglullis | Hacker News Reader

I was working on the same building as the team from Protocol Labs. I talked with a couple of devs and it seems like they never even considered that most people who would be interested in running a node would like to have control over who gets access to the pinned files. I think I opened a ticket asking for an ACL system, but it got closed.

I really had high hopes for it, but I realized that all I really want is an object storage with content addressable urls.

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We've been pioneering privacy and access control on top of IPFS since 2015 in Peergos [0].

We have block level access control for example: https://peergos.org/posts/bats

As well as E2EE, sharing, trustless servers and more [1].

[0] https://github.com/peergos/peergos

[1] https://book.peergos.org

Ok, that is really cool. I worry though that this is too tied into the whole peergos architecture? Can you give some pointers on what would I need to do to have a node with the extended protocol and nothing else?

The block auth is very generic, just an extra top level key in cbor maps or a small prefix in raw blocks. The protocol is S3 V4 signatures.

There is a Java implementation of the modified bitswap for this in Nabu [0] and a Go one in ipfs-nucleus [1]. With both of these you can use whatever auth verification protocol you like.

[0] https://github.com/peergos/nabu

[1] https://github.com/peergos/ipfs-nucleus/

Hi, PL-funded founder here.

This was one of the things that made IPFS a non-starter for us. We ended up grafting Hashicorp Vault into kubo (the go-ipfs implementation) so that we could use IPFS and have things like detetes and access revocation that actually work.

ACLs are fundamentally incompatible with blockchains. Your only solution is to encrypt those files, and have off-chain key management if you ever want to revoke access.

IPFS and distributed filesystems have nothing to do with blockchains.

Filecoin, the thing funding IPFS, certainly does :)

Sure, but IPFS, the technology, doesn’t.

IPFS is entwined with (and pretty much 100% backed by) Filecoin, which is a blockchain. Introducing a point of incompatibility would be a nonstarter.

Nothing is "entwined". I can download kubo and run it without even knowing what Filecoin is. In fact, every user of Brave browser does it. Same thing for projects like OrbitDB. Same thing for customers of Pinata.

I can download F2FS and run it on my RAM. That doesn't mean that F2FS isn't entwined with NVMe SSDs.

In fact, while F2FS is a ludicrous example, this happens regularly with filesystems. The core design of filesystems is still built assuming that a block device will be behind it. IPFS is the same way, just s/block device/blockchain/.

I'm sorry, I really have no idea where you are trying to go with this.

- You can have files on IPFS and no blockchain whatsoever "behind it".

- IPFS itself makes no use of blockchains as an abstration for data storage or file organization

- If all the blockchains networks and nodes disappeared overnight, no IPFS nodes would be affected.

I don't know if you actually used any of that or just going by hearsay.

ACLs are compatible with some blockchains. Token gating, merkle proofs, and RBAC are fairly common in smart contracts. See: https://docs.openzeppelin.com/contracts/2.x/access-control#r...

In terms of interacting with smart contracts, yes. In terms of accessing data, no. All data on a blockchain is public and immutable, and that's the point.

But nginx HTTP bridge with copyright banlist is OK…

IPFS does not in any way involve a blockchain.

There's a separate "layer on top of IPFS" called Filecoin that does involve a blockchain. (From a technical point of view, it's not really a layer on top, more of a re-implementation of IPFS with a blockchain.)

I've worked on IPFS and know many of the key people at PL. They really are not blockchain people or cryptobros. They are much different from anyone else in crypto I have encountered. But ultimately they have to fund their activities somehow, and this is the reality of where the business potential is in P2P circa mid-2020s.

i used to work at PL, surprised you got that response (don't know who you talked to). Meanwhile, folks have been building things like that:

https://guide.fission.codes/developers/webnative/file-system...

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