[alwillis]

I don’t get why people think IPFS is only a volunteer thing. The same way bitcoin quickly evolved from people mining on laptops to professionally run datacenters, so to will providing resources for IPFS.

Filecoin will allow people to monetize making content on IPFS available, with the ability to prove the content meets certain availability guarantees via smart contracts.

Making content available via IPFS will become the new way to mine cryptocurrency.

It’s all in the white paper: https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf

[zaarn]

IPFS will still be a volunteer thing. Filecoin merely allows you to pay volunteers for specific pieces of data.

But there are other protocols incoming too, like Swarm for Ethereum, Storj, etc. Some of them already available just like IPFS.

I doubt IPFS will automatically win this because it was the first to make a glorified BitTorrent client available via HTTP.

[alwillis]

But there are other protocols incoming too, like Swarm for Ethereum, Storj, etc. Some of them already available just like IPFS.

Not an apples-to-apples comparison—IPFS is the only one that’s an offline first, peer-to-peer, distributed versioned file system. Swarm is interesting but it’s for small storage for smart contracts; it’s not a general purpose, low-cost storage option for storing terabytes of data. You’re not going to take a snapshot of Wikipedia on it, for example: https://ipfs.io/blog/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/

I doubt IPFS will automatically win this because it was the first to make a glorified BitTorrent client available via HTTP.

This statement doesn’t make sense—IPFS is designed to replace HTTP, not run on top of it. While it shares some similarities to BitTorrent like using a DHT for content addressing, it’s really a different thing.

They didn’t raise $257 million from their ICO and VCs to pay volunteers using consumer-grade equipment; they’re clearing looking to disrupt the cloud storage market: https://www.coindesk.com/257-million-filecoin-breaks-time-re...

[zaarn]

>Swarm is interesting but it’s for small storage for smart contracts; it’s not a general purpose, low-cost storage option for storing terabytes of data.

Swarm is intended to do exactly that.

IPFS, atm, does not store terabytes of data. If I were to just dump in my data, it would be unusable within the hour as there is no incentive for nodes to keep those terabytes active and around.

> You’re not going to take a snapshot of Wikipedia on it, for example: https://ipfs.io/blog/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/

Swarm already hosts static websites, snapshots of wikipedia are feasible.

>IPFS is designed to replace HTTP, not run on top of it. While it shares some similarities to BitTorrent like using a DHT for content addressing, it’s really a different thing.

IPFS does not address dynamic content properly, IPNS is way to slow to allow websites on the scale of google to operate sensible. I doubt IPNS could handle a decently sized subreddit in terms of activity.

IPFS is unlikely to replace HTTP since both protocols address different problems. However, as it is usable today, IPFS is little more than a cache that can store some data for a bit until nobody is interested in it.

>They didn’t raise $257 million from their ICO and VCs to pay volunteers using consumer-grade equipment; they’re clearing looking to disrupt the cloud storage market: https://www.coindesk.com/257-million-filecoin-breaks-time-re....

Last I recall, Filecoin is not IPFS, it merely works on top of IPFS. You may revie your argument and replace every occurence of "IPFS" with "Filecoin", in which case it would still compete with Swarm, Storj, etc.

[vog]

> I doubt IPFS will automatically win this because it was the first to make a glorified BitTorrent client available via HTTP.

This may be true.

On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if IPFS would win for exactly that reason.