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by v_london 1703 days ago
Pretty interesting. A lot of people here are focusing on permanence, but for me the main difference on addressing by content vs by host name is the loss of authorship it opens up for the web. Since a research paper of essay is referred to by its hash, the owner effectively gives away all control of the work when it's first published. There will be no editing, no taking down unwanted work, and no real way to build an interactive website that allows dynamic linking to other materials by the author.

It's interesting how the same people promoting the "creator economy" also tend to promote the cryptocurrency space and IPFS without an ounce of self-awareness. IPFS sounds awful for creators of all kinds in the same way as BitTorrent was awful for artists. I can definitely see a use case for IPFS as a file storage for trustless systems such as smart contracts, which are designed as immutable, trustless systems.
2 comments
naasking 1703 days ago
You don't lose authorship, you lose ownership, which arguably you don't have under the regular internet either, ie. Once uploaded, anyone can mirror your content. Arguably under ipfs you literally cannot lose authorship if you put the author in the content because then authorship is part of the content hash used to address/load it.
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Gigachad 1703 days ago
IPFS claims to solve this with their name service IPNS which can update to point to a new hash with a revised file. Where the original hash can be cached and used but users can refer to the NS version and get the latest version. But last I saw, the name on IPNS had to be frequently pushed by the original server or it would go away.
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davidgerard 1703 days ago
IPNS doesn't work. Whenever you press them on this point, they'll admit it doesn't work.

But IPFS has the crypto problem of conflating the stuff that works now with the stuff that's hypothetical in its marketing, and not admitting that the latter is janky nonsense that doesn't bloody work.

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PLDiscordian 1703 days ago
Sorry, I don't know when you last tried out IPFS, but IPNS does in fact work: https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/ipns/

Again, I'm not sure when it wasn't working, or when it began working (it's always worked since I've been around), but IPNS has made huge strides, I use it every day. Even https://ipfs.io is using IPNS, it's very popular.

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Gigachad 1703 days ago
Yeah this is what I saw 4 years ago. Shame it still isn't working. Insane how crypto projects spend all this effort on flashy landing pages, marketing, hype. But if you actually try to use the product, you find out it just doesn't actually work.
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jayd16 1703 days ago
Seems like at that point it might be easier to just build a new http+ protocol that supports document signing and focuses on bringing caching back.

You could use all the current web/http/DNS infrastructure, and add certified/cacheable GET results.

Anyone could run their own proxy and cache what they see fit. Seems like an easier transition as it could be fully compatible with the current web.

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