Hm, I've taken a look at some of the Storage Provider ROI dashboards and AFAIK numbers aren't anything like that -- so not sure what timeframe or cost of goods you're extrapolating from. (ex https://fgas.io/)
I'm also confused how your model accounts for all the ecosystem development and enablement work that is being done across the Filecoin ecosystem. Filecoin isn't just another ETH clone - there is a ton of engineering and product work happening across many teams, with a ton of resources and dev work being poured into them (ex https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApVVg78ZBog)
Fine to complain about crypto economic token distributions or something specific - but please don't imply that the dev teams working on Filecoin / IPFS are freeloading or disingenuous. There's a massive amount of work going into building new content-addressed web primitives by some very mission-driven folks that you're unintentionally maligning. (full disclosure - I'm one of them)
You have 2 main pathways for building on FVM:
1. (available sooner) Building an EVM smart contract that then interfaces with Filecoin's built-in actors. This will use existing EVM smart contract dev tools like HardHat, Truffle, Remix, Metamask, etc - and most contracts will likely be written in solidity (or any other EVM compatible language)
2. Native Rust smart contracts (or any language that compiles to run directly in the wasm FVM runtime). There is less tooling available for this today (though there are a few WIP SDKs being built in the Early Builders program), but maybe more accessible if you don't know solidity.
Hmm, I wouldn't assume the goal here is censorship resistance (esp given IPFS+ENS already fits that niche better). Looks to me like someone in the ecosystem is seeing the recent massive speed up to IPNS publishing (launched last week) and testing the waters on whether an "IPNS+DNS as a service" site would be useful to the folks that host dweb sites on IPFS.
Not sure when you last paged into IPFS - the team has made some pretty awesome performance improvements in the past year and seen strong adoption to match (ex, nearly all NFTs are stored on IPFS today).
Definitely check out the IPFS 0.9 release from last week if you haven't seen it! Has some MASSIVE speed ups to IPNS propagation - we're talking less than a second resolution now! There's also a new experimental DHT client that can provide 30M records in about 2.5 hours (which the folks at nft.storage are using reliably at scale). -- https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/releases/tag/v0.9.0
This is cool! Curious if you'd be interested in doing a more formal anonymity audit of OnionCat+IPFS? AFAIK, the main hesitancy in making more of these capabilities broadly available is a potential mismatch between _expectations_ of privacy from a TOR+IPFS solution vs real-world constraints on reader/writer privacy for a distributed p2p system.
On this page in Brave (chrome-extension://nibjojkomfdiaoajekhjakgkdhaomnch/dist/options/options.html) you can choose any IPFS gateway you prefer (or even run your own gateway if you want!).
That's a great idea! I know there's a project in the works to have redundant copies of the Archive stored on Filecoin, so expanding that to also make the data available for Collaborative Clusters should be totally doable. We'd have to slice the archive down into bites that small machines like yours and mine can help with though. Thanks for the suggestion!
You can become an IPFS Cluster Follower (https://collab.ipfscluster.io/#instructions) and help back up various datasets of IPFS content (like Project Gutenberg, Package Managers, Websites, etc)
We're actually implementing a standard Pinning API right now! You can check out the spec here (https://github.com/ipfs/pinning-services-api-spec) - currently being integrated by Pinata and soon others.
When was the last time you tried? 0.5.0 from May had a lot of improvements - but go is still a hungry hungry beast. maybe try using Desktop which sets a lower peer count?
Thanks! We've been making a lot of updates to the documentation to make it easier to use - so glad it feels easy to follow!
I'll follow up on the Pinata docs example. There are a lot of options for how to persist content in the IPFS network, and we should describe all of them (even if Pinata is one of the smoother/easier to use ones for those new to IPFS who don't want to run their own persistent node). Feel free to file an issue or PR on that docs page if you get a second and we'll help get that fixed ASAP.
You may enjoy this HackFS Workshop from Juan Benet (creator of Filecoin) that starts pretty high level but gets much more into the details of how the Filecoin network works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P28aNAdZDi4
Correct, IPFS is not a blockchain - while both are merkle-dags ('directed acyclic graphs' of hash-linked data), blockchains have all nodes sync the state collectively, while IPFS instead shards state across the entire network (such that each node maintains its own filestore).
Nope - but used by lots of blockchains for things like off-chain storage (since having a content-addressable handle for a file that can never change is super critical for things like smart contracts)
For anyone looking at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.07747.pdf to get an estimate on the actual # of IPFS nodes, note that these tools are trying to crawl the number of nodes acting as "DHT Servers" in the Public IPFS DHT. Nodes behind home firewalls or NATs don't become DHT routers because they aren't dialable, and other large users intentionally set many of their nodes into a lower-bandwidth client mode. Also, many applications run their own private IPFS networks (like OpenBazaar for instance) and don't participate in the Public IPFS DHT, so wouldn't be reached through a crawler here.
Actually, content-based addresses is really critical for decentralized web stuff - since you can't trust a single source to name data, and instead want many different parties to participate in the same global address space in a secure and trustless manner. Check out the dweb primer for why working with a base-layer built on content addressing is so powerful: https://flyingzumwalt.gitbooks.io/decentralized-web-primer/a...
IPNS is used by many groups to create a mutable layer over IPFS (it recently got much faster in our 0.5.0 release in April), but you can also use tools like Textile, OrbitDB, or other mutable databases built on IPFS.
A few highlights are Fleek, Textile, Audius, 3box, Anytype, Qri, Berty, and MagicLeap! Specifically in the blockchain space, there's Peepeth, Augur, Uniswap, Civic, Arbore, and Aragon.