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mikert89

Does IPFS actually have users? I remeber when they raised 270 million and a bunch of people there got wildly wealthy

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The only place where I regularly stumble upon on it was/is on libgen.

You can see public network metrics here: https://probelab.io/ipfs/

About 800k unique DHT clients are seen weekly.

I run a company currently serving ~1.7B requests per day (~20k/s) to ipfs gateways, so presumably still some. Very likely a big chunk of that is bots scraping stuff.

I guess IPFS is an artifact from the crypto craze. It's pretty silly if you think of it. However, I must admit, I got my first ever developer grant from Filecoin while they were flush with ZIRP era money.

btw,I thought it was an Initial Coin Offering, not an actual fundraise.

What's silly about it? Content-addressable decentralized storage -- not tied to a cryptocurrency -- is really valuable for censorship-resistant archiving of politically-sensitive data (such as climate change research).

It's the crypto aspect that's silly. Tech is cool IMO. However, the crypto adjacency makes it all look scammy tbh.

In addition to that, this noble goal of being an insurance policy against censorship never played out.

How hard would it be for a country to block the clients and browser extensions you need to use it in the first place? Or to develop a firewall technology that’s capable of blocking the traffic?

Probably not that hard, especially since nobody uses IPFS for anything business critical since it’s not all that great at doing things that you need from file storage systems.

Most reasons you store files somewhere benefit from not being decentralized. You usually want some combination of performance, security, durability, and availability. Decentralization is not generally a demand of file storage.

The only reason it’s decentralized is because blockchain and crypto was hype 10 years ago.

> The only reason it’s decentralized is because blockchain and crypto was hype 10 years ago.

IPFS is not "blockchain" or "crypto"(currency).

It's much closer to git-over-bittorrent. Note that both of those things were decentralised long before "blockchain" and "crypto" existed.

The makers of IPFS also made a crypto thing called Filecoin; but that's a different project. Avoiding IPFS because of crypto is like avoiding the Web because of social media.

Except it wasn’t censorship resistant at all, in that your node advertised itself as a node with a-z files on it. Separately you could put it behind a vpn or run a vps you paid for with monero, but fundamentally it’s more of a way just to pin a file to an address that works no matter what domain or IP the file is behind.

Censorship resistant in the same sense that bittorrent is, with no single centralized server or domain registration to target.

But bittorrent has been successfully censored. People are afraid to run it because they know their ISP will forward them demand letters.

That's not what we were talking about here. But as long as we're on this tangent I hardly think using a VPN constitutes a high bar to clear. There are still plenty of jurisdictions remaining in the world that in practice don't care to enforce copyright law against individuals (or sometimes at all).

Most western governments are currently in the process of making anonymous VPNs illegal.

Evidence? But also, so what? By definition the VPN will be exiting in a country tolerant of the conduct in question. It's also possible to purchase from an operation headquartered there, or even to directly purchase a VPS.

What people did or planned to do with IPFS is pretty silly, but the idea of content addressed storage with cryptographic (not in a crypo coin way) names makes a lot of sense. It would make for a great software distribution method e.g. your game downloads get faster the more people want to play the latest version. It's the combination of Git and BitTorrent and has uses far beyond just hosting warez and NFTs.

Sure can see the use cases where it might be helpful, but "a better bittorrent" on its own doesn't warrant the hype or cash flowing into it.

I guess the user base has proven this out in the end. Torrents are good enough.

This. I also always imagined it be able to host some version of an Encarta/encyclopedia that would be so distributed it would probably survive world wide catastrophe.

IIRC IPFS was the latest in a long line of Distributed Content-Addressed systems that long predate crypto. AFAICT (obviously I wasn't paying much attention) they went crypto (FileCoin) to fund a base population of storage users to bootstrap its popularity.

But that didn't pan out.

> btw, I thought it was an Initial Coin Offering, not an actual fundraise.

An ICO is a type of fundraise.

Most of the generative art is hosted on IPFS.

Wait are you telling me yet another supposedly ground breaking technology turned out to be yet another grift.

I know a lot of people on HN are going to call me overly cynical. But this pattern should be so obvious by now. Any cynicism to any new ground breaking technology which is gonna solve a problem that exists because of capitalism, that this cynicism is more than warranted.

At this point we should all be cynical of any new technology.

Yeah, I now understand why gray beards are seen as grumpy. Mine isn’t gray yet, but after the 2010s and half of 2020s I can only see as very suspicious any new technology pushed hard by the industry

New technology has always benefitted first and foremost those in power, simply because people who get to extract wealth from the rest of society can then direct that wealth to acquire new tech first. This was equally true in pre-capitalist societies, or in USSR for that matter.

Being cynical about the tech itself is a bridge to nowhere, though, because it does not preclude its existence or usage, it just cuts you away from any benefits that you can personally get out of it - but you're still affected by all the downsides.

Don't be cynical about tech. Be angry at the people who want to own it all and use it to exploit you.

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