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by capableweb 1861 days ago
> Isn't this the exact value-prop of Filecoin

Yes, exactly. Would love being able to use Filecoin or any of the alternatives (Storj, Sia and those) but they are all very immature right now, both UX and stability wise. If it's not hard to get the files into the networks, it's hard to get them out again.

IPFS could work as it's not ruined by the whole blockchain mess, but then you might as well use torrents (which people are successfully using already for Sci-Hub).

2 comments

Filecoin has massive overhead. It also relies on exchange of funds to keep the files around. If you want to VOLUNTEER to store the files for others for free, then Filecoin adds needless overhead!

And yeah, torrents already let you do this.

Torrents are not suited for websites at all. There are however numerous websites which are available on IPFS.
Sci-Hub is not "A website" though. It's a archive, archive of scientific papers that can be served by a static file server, IPFS or torrents. Have the DOI be the filename of the paper, and now you even have a DOI-lookup functionality in your static file server.

Sure, you could do that over IPFS. But if you really want scale, censorship-resistance and wide-spread usage/storing of it, you'll use torrents (today, maybe future will be different)

IPFS is built on torrent technology so it has those same proprieties. The advantage here is that IPFS additionally handles the front-end - the website, search and any future features that might be added like a blog or forum.
IPFS is not "built on torrent technology", it does borrow some of the ideas that Bittorrent also uses. And no, IPFS won't automatically give you search and other things, you have to build those yourself, same as if you used Bittorrent.