Comment by giantrobot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by giantrobot | Hacker News Reader

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I see the primary issue with IPFS is a significant majority of all web users are on mobile. They can't act as content hosts or routers. In P2P parlance they can only ever act as leeches. Even people with full fledged computers the market is dominated by laptops. These have similar availability issues as phones even if they don't have the same storage or connectivity limitations.

Compared to the total number of users on the Internet relatively few have stable always-on machines ready to host P2P content. ISPs do not make it easy or at times possible to poke holes in firewalls to allow for easy hosting on residential connections. This necessitates hole punching which adds non-trivial delays on connections and overall poorer network performance.

It's less about imagination being dead but instead limitations of the modern Internet retards momentum of P2P anything.

> I see the primary issue with IPFS is a significant majority of all web users are on mobile. They can't act as content hosts or routers.

Is there any reason this has to be true? Probably some majority or significant minority of mobile devices spend some eight hours a day attached to a charger in a place where they have the WiFi password, while the user is asleep. And you don't need 100% of devices to be hosts or routers, 10% at any given time would be more than sufficient.

> And you don't need 100% of devices to be hosts or routers, 10% at any given time would be more than sufficient.

Except it don't. Route and content takes hours to converge.

Why?

Is convergence necessary?

If a peer says "hey there's a new version of this" and that peer also has pinned that version, then I can get it from them right now, well before the network converges. Yeah maybe it'll take a few hours for the other side of the planet to get the word, but for most data a couple hours or a couple days is fine. Tolerating latencies was kind of the point of calling it "interplanetary".

What's the use case where I'm on the other side of the planet and I somehow end up with a CID which I can't resolve? How did I get that CID so much faster than content to which it refers?

Why not? If internet access goes away there's no reason the data on my phone can't be made available to other phones on the same LAN.

The tricky part is the trust networking that incentivizes me to allow those others to do so.

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