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Comment by chriswarbo | Hacker News Reader

I agree that IPNS has always seemed a bit naff; but alternatives naming systems can be used too (if your system's name resolver can understand them); e.g. this uses pkarr addresses for IPFS content: http://www.chriswarbo.net/blog/2026-05-08-pkdnslink.html

Regarding an "update path", GNS has support for that built-in; though I've not been able to try it myself, since I can't get GNUNet to bootstrap :-(

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I always thought that they should have used ENS instead of whatever coin they ended up making. GNS is cool but IIRC (years ago) it had no incentive mechanism which is I think where a lot of these solutions fall down. Even imaginary "ratio points" that p2p file sharing sites have being using for years work better than "donate your resources out of the goodness of your heart".

Half baked comment but I feel like many of these efforts are too purist. Sure they need to think more carefully about incentives from a systemic angle but also why not accept a hybrid design that doesn't depend on those in the first place? For example plenty of people operate their own nameservers for their own websites to use, or spin up a VPS to support [thing] they make use of. So at a minimum I'm sure webring-style infra where you cover for your friends and they cover for you would work quite well.

For a real world example of a hybrid approach that works see bittorrent where torrents can optionally contain urls that point to alternate download sources in order to speed up the initial seeding phase.

My personal opinion is that any notion of "incentive mechanisms" for IPFS is bullshit: whether Filecoin, or otherwise.

There is already a perfectly good incentive mechanism: if someone wants to host some data, they can; and if nobody wants to host it, it doesn't get hosted.

That's worked perfectly well for HTTP, without any shitcoin needed. The advantage of IPFS is that its URLs resolve to anybody who cares enough to host that data; so links will only 404 when nobody cares (unlike HTTP, which relies on a single point of failure).

Did it actually work for HTTP though? Look at the modern web and tell me it's perfectly well.

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