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Comment by randall | Hacker News Reader

So what if I want to dynamically create content? Limited to using this as a sort of cdn edge?

I was wondering this as well. Ultimately, distributed systems are just a very different animal. The first step is designing your data to be stored in files, rather than a database. In practice of course, all durable databases persist to disk, so that's not a big deal.

From there though, you have 2 more problems: keeping all data from being public (maybe becoming "friends" with another user involves a key exchange?) and distributing updates in a reasonable way. It'd be kinda strange if Lady Gaga had to buy a ginormous server to serve all the requests to her Twitter feed. I'm not sure how IPFS is implemented but if it's similar to BitTorrent in the sense that data can be seeded from any node, then that problem sort-of takes care of itself. You definitely can't think about "dynamically creating content" in the sense that twitter.com/:username may render different things at different times. The concept of web search also becomes an (even more) interesting one.

On a somewhat-related note, one also has to wonder how this system would interact with the European "right to be forgotten". Any legislature ensuring such a "right" would make this protocol a bit of a non-starter (at least in those jurisdictions).

Ultimately I think IPFS is a pretty cool concept, one I've kicked around a bit but never fleshed out. Major kudos to Juan and everyone else for taking it on - I look forward to seeing where this goes.

IPFS has ipfs for immutable data, and ipns for mutable ones. It uses a DHT to name an ipfs hash.

We're actually in the middle of finishing up a demo for mounting a Docker registry on top of IPFS, and showing we can freely push/pull from it. https://github.com/ipfs/container-demos/pull/19

> The first step is designing your data to be stored in files, rather than a database

Somewhere in the middle-- ipfs gives you native access to the merkledag datastructure, so you can actually port most databases to using ipfs as a kv-store directly. (think an embedded sqlite or something). and on the other side, maybe you dont need a database. maybe you can just construct the graph of objects you need and write that to ipfs.

> maybe becoming "friends" with another user involves a key exchange?

yep! we've discussed an `ipfs friend` cmd

> Ultimately I think IPFS is a pretty cool concept, one I've kicked around a bit but never fleshed out. Major kudos to Juan and everyone else for taking it on - I look forward to seeing where this goes.

Thank you!! Come help us build it! :)

Well, if you need a central source to store and provide the state or content then it's not distributed anyway. The notion of developing on a distributed system is a whole different paradigm than traditional web development.

Otherwise, JS is JS no matter how its received.

we have a system for this called IPNS, (the interplanetary naming system). It is essentially a global, signed pointer to whatever content you want, we also have DNS mappings to ipfs objects as well.

see section 3.7 of the paper here: https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs/blob/master/papers/ipfs-cap2pfs...

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