How does Hearth achieve the "decentralized" status? I assume Hearth is offering a small-volume pinning service on the side as a charity right now? If that's true, it's essentially no more "decentralized" than a normal website.
IPFS doesn't actually distribute hosting unless someone else goes through the trouble of doing pinning. Some gateways may keep local copies but they're also free to destroy local copies.
In the typical deployment where nodes refer to their own local IPFS services, it's often the case that the primary IPFS pin serves the majority of traffic.
If we're going to call that "distributed" then so are normal webpages with random caching options.
No, because the hosting problem really isn't solved and FileCoin was something of a massive train wreck.
When the most charitable critique of your ICO is, "We don't think this is a scam because the people involved aren't famous scammers but it certainly looks scammy" you've failed to solve your problem.
What are the points of failure in IPFS vs bitorrent? I'm curious now, because it seems like you're dissing IPFS because you dislike FileCoin (which I don't care for either)
Going back to the IPFS/But torrent analogy, I don't understand how bitorrent hosting problem is any more solved than the IPFS hosting problem.
I bring this up because my orginal point that I think IPFS counts as distributed, because bittorrent counts as distributed. So far you haven't really convinced me that they're all that different.
Many IPFS nodes only serve local clients, never serve remote clients or the larger network, and don't expect to be throttled by peers.
In short, IPFS is basically an alternative content addressed routing system that tends to have some slight endpoint caching.
Bittorrent at least heavily penalizes nodes that don't play ball rather quickly. So it rewards nodes that disseminate info as they acquire it, and make it trivial for storage to participate.
I don't see IPFS as solving distributed storage problems at all. Neither do the creators, which is why they started a related project called FileCoin to help with that. Too bad about that.
If you think they're not "all that different" then I refer you to the white papers. I'm disinclined to play a longer adversarial lecture game.
OK. Now I get where you're coming from. I didn't realize that FileCoin was started by the creators of IPFS. That is too bad. You really don't need crypto as a vehicle for paying someone to mirror content.
With regards to Bittorrent... I guess where you and I differ is that I think Bittorrent is just as broke as IPFS when it comes down to it. Or maybe same type of broke, but less so than IPFS. While the seeding incentives certainly help bittorrent, I don't think it fundementally makes it better than IFPS. I know what when I've torrented things, I've always seeded less than I leeched. Long-lived torrents are either a) pretty popular or b) have some people intentionally keeping it alive... which is what I would expect in IPFS too.
I will have to go read those white-papers. If I'm reading your comment right, it sounds like you consider the broken-ness of IFPS to be so much worse than that of Bittorrent that you think it deserves its own category.
Or perhaps that the expectations of IFPS compared to its own broken-ness puts it in its own category. I think of Bittorrent and IPFS as distributed distribution, not storage. And while Bittorrent people see Bittorrent as distributed distribution (caching), IPFS markets itself as distributed storage. Which, that makes sense given the use cases IPFS seems to want to fill - it wants to replace static http stuff, whereas bittorrent seems to serve small more canonical files, stuff that's already always identical independent of the source. Like ISOs or other things that people were generally sending each other directly anyways.
I think it too until you last comment for all of the above thoughts to congeal. And I'm sorry it came off as adversarial. Thanks for taking the time to respond.
What am I missing?