Ask HN: How does IPFS help the interplanetary Internet of the future?
IPFS (Interplanetary File System) is marketed as a New Internet: an HTTP replacement.
Content hashing, deduplication, data resilience/permanence, and P2P content downloads/uploads are all excellent features, and IPNS is a layer on top that gives the system a more human interface.
However to me this feature set makes IPFS sounds like a supercharged CDN, rather than a new kind of Internet.
If we're going to set up a lunar base, or start a civilisation on Mars, is IPFS actually going to make connecting them to the Internet easier? (Assuming connecting the networks of the Moon, Mars and Earth is something we want to do.) Is it going to improve our/their experience of the Internet?
How well does IPFS actually solve (or help solve) the problems of connecting and maintaining an Internet distributed across huge amounts of open space?
5 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 19.4 ms ] threadYou can imagine say a satellite (or multiple satellites) between Mars and moon is a peer that contains hashes to your website content. Rather than make the full trip to earth you can just get that hash from the satellite instead drastically decreasing load times.
Wouldn’t worry about interplanetary shit, it’s marketing bs.
If I understand you, you're describing a problem that IPFS is not intending to solve.
OP is right, IPFS is (tasked with being a) largely a supercharged, local-first CDN. The thought is that the web as it is designed is not scalable, and seamless locality of the data is important.
Personally I agree with that, it's a bit silly that we download from non-local sources constantly. However long term storage as you cite is not something that IPFS aims to be. Nor is it a problem I think inherently needs solving.
In your view, why do we need a permanent internet? What is that solving, and who is hosting it?