[StreamBright]

> IPFS still has a long way to go until it is useable in my opinion.

Now we just need to figure out what to use it for. I think the largest successful experiment of distributed file storage was Wuala. At the beginning it was similar to IPFS, using random home devices to store data, doing some clever calculation and splitting of files to guarantee that a file is likely always available. Emphasis on likely.

They had nice features:

- keep files private

- share files with other registered users

- share files with unregistered users, through a keyed hyperlink

- publish files

- backup

- file synchronization

- file versioning

At the end they migrated away from using random home nodes for storage and went for central servers. Not sure about the motivation behind it but I would really like to know. Did that happen because of business requirements or some technical limitations?

[ianopolous]

I was a huge fan of Wuala, and was very disappointed when they got bought and then shut down. My understanding is they always stored a central copy of everything on their servers to 100% guarantee availability. The P2P copies merely helped with bandwidth. I think their main innovation is the cryptree data structure for access control. We use a more advanced version of that in Peergos[1].

[1] https://github.com/peergos/peergos

[zimbatm]

Building on top of other people's infrastructure is expensive.

Each node can disappear at any time and is really hard to predict. To compensate for that you will need to upload your data to more nodes. You have to deal with backward and forward-compatible updates because both client and server versions updates are also not under your control. There are also more complicated issues of trust and bad actors that can affect the product.

Now you have a datacenter. The clients upload their data exactly once. Your server software has at most two concurrent versions during deployment. Security is handled in a traditional fashion with DDoS firewalls and pentesting. Your whole software stack is much simpler because you can build on top of more solid assumptions.

Skype also used to be P2P until the Microsoft acquisition where they moved towards hosted nodes. Some people say it's so that Microsoft can spy on everybody but I really believe that the main reason was so that they could improve the QoS.