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by mikert894 hours ago |
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upvoteby 2color1 hours ago|
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You can see public network metrics here: https://probelab.io/ipfs/

About 800k unique DHT clients are seen weekly.

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upvoteby devttyeu1 hours ago|
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I run a company currently serving ~1.7B requests per day (~20k/s) to ipfs gateways, so presumably still some. Very likely a big chunk of that is bots scraping stuff.
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upvoteby dewey4 hours ago|
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The only place where I regularly stumble upon on it was/is on libgen.
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upvoteby muragekibicho3 hours ago|
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I guess IPFS is an artifact from the crypto craze. It's pretty silly if you think of it. However, I must admit, I got my first ever developer grant from Filecoin while they were flush with ZIRP era money.

btw,I thought it was an Initial Coin Offering, not an actual fundraise.

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upvoteby gwerbin3 hours ago|
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What's silly about it? Content-addressable decentralized storage -- not tied to a cryptocurrency -- is really valuable for censorship-resistant archiving of politically-sensitive data (such as climate change research).
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upvoteby jazzyjackson2 hours ago|
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Except it wasn’t censorship resistant at all, in that your node advertised itself as a node with a-z files on it. Separately you could put it behind a vpn or run a vps you paid for with monero, but fundamentally it’s more of a way just to pin a file to an address that works no matter what domain or IP the file is behind.
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upvoteby fc417fc80216 minutes ago|
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Censorship resistant in the same sense that bittorrent is, with no single centralized server or domain registration to target.
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upvoteby muragekibicho2 hours ago|
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It's the crypto aspect that's silly. Tech is cool IMO. However, the crypto adjacency makes it all look scammy tbh.
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upvoteby Grombobulous2 hours ago|
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In addition to that, this noble goal of being an insurance policy against censorship never played out.

How hard would it be for a country to block the clients and browser extensions you need to use it in the first place? Or to develop a firewall technology that’s capable of blocking the traffic?

Probably not that hard, especially since nobody uses IPFS for anything business critical since it’s not all that great at doing things that you need from file storage systems.

Most reasons you store files somewhere benefit from not being decentralized. You usually want some combination of performance, security, durability, and availability. Decentralization is not generally a demand of file storage.

The only reason it’s decentralized is because blockchain and crypto was hype 10 years ago.

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upvoteby lallysingh2 hours ago|
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IIRC IPFS was the latest in a long line of Distributed Content-Addressed systems that long predate crypto. AFAICT (obviously I wasn't paying much attention) they went crypto (FileCoin) to fund a base population of storage users to bootstrap its popularity.

But that didn't pan out.

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upvoteby crest2 hours ago|
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What people did or planned to do with IPFS is pretty silly, but the idea of content addressed storage with cryptographic (not in a crypo coin way) names makes a lot of sense. It would make for a great software distribution method e.g. your game downloads get faster the more people want to play the latest version. It's the combination of Git and BitTorrent and has uses far beyond just hosting warez and NFTs.
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upvoteby spockz11 minutes ago|
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This. I also always imagined it be able to host some version of an Encarta/encyclopedia that would be so distributed it would probably survive world wide catastrophe.
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upvoteby JeremyNT2 hours ago|
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Sure can see the use cases where it might be helpful, but "a better bittorrent" on its own doesn't warrant the hype or cash flowing into it.

I guess the user base has proven this out in the end. Torrents are good enough.

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upvoteby airspresso3 hours ago|
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Most of the generative art is hosted on IPFS.
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upvoteby runarberg4 hours ago|
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Wait are you telling me yet another supposedly ground breaking technology turned out to be yet another grift.

I know a lot of people on HN are going to call me overly cynical. But this pattern should be so obvious by now. Any cynicism to any new ground breaking technology which is gonna solve a problem that exists because of capitalism, that this cynicism is more than warranted.

At this point we should all be cynical of any new technology.

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upvoteby dgellow4 hours ago|
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Yeah, I now understand why gray beards are seen as grumpy. Mine isn’t gray yet, but after the 2010s and half of 2020s I can only see as very suspicious any new technology pushed hard by the industry
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upvoteby 4 hours ago|
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deleted
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