[tristanhoy]

Exactly, it's a tamper proof P2P file system.

But it's far from immutable. Torrents die every day because people stop hosting them. The best thing you can do to keep an important but unpopular file alive is ongoing upkeep: host it on your own infrastructure, or pay for an Amazon S3 torrent.

IPFS and filecoins are exactly the same. The availability depends on either popularity, running your own server and hoping you don't have a fire, or ongoing payments for redundant storage.

That's not immutable.

Blockchain has a much stronger immutability guarantee, because everyone involved is economically incentivised to maintain every single transaction that ever took place, no matter how insignificant.

[diggan]

Yeah, the content itself might not always be available, the only guarantee is that if that content exists, you'll get exactly that. If the content is not available, you get nothing.

So the links themselves are immutable but the content might not be available.

[tristanhoy]

And that's what's so hilarious about putting a content hash on a blockchain, when you can just give it to someone over HTTPS. The hash is plenty immutable all on its own.

Strong transaction ordering can give you proof of existence at a certain point in time, but that's not useful in an identity context.