all the NFTs I launched actually were fully onchain SVGs and CSS
tried to be the change I wanted to see
given where the concept actually found staying power (liquidity pools, instead of collectibles) it wholly needs a new name
“NFT” is distracting at this point, they should just called them 721-structs so people don’t get distracted by the fumbled poorly implemented art use case
despite the "non fungible" in the name, tickets in this format ironically adds fungibility that non-blockchain marketplaces decrease
right now outside of the web3 space, all promotion companies release tickets in different ways. the ability to resell them is unknown, the quantity for sale is unknown and opaque, the service fees make no sense for the last 20 years, the ability to transfer them is unknown, and the ability to lose your money on an attempted resale transaction is absurdly high. in comparison, all NFTs in the blockchain space inherit solutions to all of those problems and all marketplaces are just UI's on top of data already there in a uniform way, alongside new problems that are mostly education based and won't be solved with a different user experience (akin to how debit and credit cards introduced new problems with automated teller machines many decades ago, that never were solved but didn't deter the concept)
can a centralized marketplace and issuer that conforms solve all of it? of course, but that hasn't been the rubric for nearly a decade....
developing in the blockchain space isn't to attract non-blockchain users - at least for anything that actually earns revenue - its solving frictions for existing blockchain users because they are there, numerous and its lucrative
it's a parallel economy that you either accept the existence of or you don't, there are a lot of people trying to act like it has merged with other economies or asking you to use a big stake of money on blockchain assets with the hope that it becomes a bigger stake of money if they did merge, but that's really a distraction that has little to do with what's already happened and functioning fine
The asset is more akin to a deed or a claim. Most NFTs are images hosted on S3 or IPFS. The blockchain entry is metadata with a pointer to the hosted asset.
The NFT is the metadata. The metadata is the token that cannot be funged.
The image is a wholly separate thing that a token points at, and multiple tokens can point at the same thing just fine. NFTs be be funge-free but images are fully fungible.
The value of the deed is it being backed by the legal system as proof of your ownership, up to potentially being enforced with government use of physical force.
I know you jest, but both the IPFS contributors I knew in college graduated to become web3 degens working on decentralized file storage projects. Specifically Walrus, which grew out of Meta's Libra project.
Finding out NFTs were just links, didn't even embed the asset, was such a moment for me... like either the people pushing this are complete fools or 100% conscious grifters who know it's total bullshit. I suspect it was a mix.
Insane.
I think a lot of the AI skepticism comes from the fact that the last major New Thing (tm) pushed by this industry was crypto. People are very, very burned by that.
That and how badly social media turned out, but that's a whole different discourse.
An NFT doesn't have to be just a link; nothing in principle stops someone creating a NFT that stores the full bytes of some digital asset directly on the blockchain, just as nothing in principle stops someone from creating a NFT that doesn't do this (or equivalently, a NFT whose on-chain content is simply a text hyperlink to something). The Bitcoin Ordinals concept of Inscriptions (https://docs.ordinals.com/inscriptions.html), which is an attempt to build a NFT system for Bitcoin, does culturally encourage placing the bytes of a digital asset into the Bitcoin blockchain, and the tooling around it assumes this model; but again nothing prevents someone from creating an Inscription whose contents are simply a link to something else.
And of course there's no reason why a NFT has to be used to represent ownership of some kind of digital art - there are other uses for NFTs, such as modeling transferable network permissions or resources.
Ultimately NFTs are a just a specific application of blockchain technology, to represent some kind of resource on a blockchain which could in principle be digital art. If people care about ownership of NFTs representing digital art, that's a social fact about what kinds of art there is market demand for; and whether it matters that the bytes of the digital art are on a blockchain or linked from somewhere else (where they could get taken down or bitrot) is also a social fact.
I actually agree that treating NFTs that merely contain a link to some bytes elsewhere that worked at one point in time is a pretty dumb thing to care about, or have a market for (and the use cases for NFTs where the bytes are actually on-chain are, at best, fairly limited, although I wouldn't say completely nonexistent). And certainly the NFT market of 2021 or so, which had a lot of such NFTs, was driven by a weird social mania and people attempting to grift upon that social mania. This has never bothered me though, because I feel the same way about many markets for physical pieces of art; and ultimately it needs to be possible for people to create markets for things I personally think are dumb or at least don't care about.
I don't think they were saying they found out all NFTs must only be links, just they found out the NFTs being peddled usually were. As you say, bytes are bytes regardless what they represent - it's just a lot easier to grift something like a 32 byte hash or a link on a chain because storing all those bytes in the blockchain would have been a damned expensive way to run a grift.
There is a difference between markets for things I don't care about and markets for things I do care a lot about, just not in a positive way. I don't think it's necessary to allow an open market exchange for phone scammers, for example, and it has nothing to do with how uninterested I am in buying people's information. Not all NFT had to fall towards that kind of thing, it's just there was so little practical usage actually being done that 99% of it ended up being that way.
I'm searching this and see some of the most valuable ones did use ipfs://hash, while others have https://some-ipfs-gateway.com/hash. So guess the latter can break, but viewers could have some list of gateway regexes to rewrite as ipfs:// to fix it.
> Protocol Labs is an innovation network driving breakthroughs in computing to push humanity forward. PL connects more than 750 tech startups, funds, accelerators, foundations, open source projects, service providers, and other organizations.
What happened to them? Seems like they drank their own "Web3" Fla-Vor-Aid.
Sad to see it go having been a maintainer some years ago.
For anyone wondering, there are more sustainable (with a viable, focused business backing the project) options to do p2p, namely Iroh - https://www.iroh.computer/ which was built by ex-IPFS ex-Protocol Labs devs (I have no relation to the team beyond having worked with them back in the day).
Sadly Protocol Labs is doing.. ehh whatever now, except apparently supporting the projects it got its VC/crypto funding from.
The way I would put is as: Iroh + iroh-blobs == libp2p + UnixFS + Bitswap, and the latter three are some of the critical components that have defined most IPFS implementations.
There is one thing we do not have yet - global content discovery. The reason for this is that so far we have not found a way to do it in a way that just works.
It is a very hard problem, but I hope we can come up with a solution so we can cover the use cases that initially got me excited about IPFS many years ago.
This. Haven't seen this in the news in years. A few years ago (2022?), they got some $x00 million in investment money. They already had IPFS/IPNS at that point so it was some deep push into Filecoin. But it felt odd at the time. Bitcoin was starting to jump the shark at that point and none of the smarter cryptos had truly found a market fit either.
I really wish Moonlight would use Iroh. I use Tailscale to make it work, but it would be so much easier to just pair a machine and have it always work.
I've seen some product prototypes with Iroh implementation and it appears pretty good for "just get node connectivity to work" when you don't want end users to bother with networking shenanigans but can guarantee Internet connectivity.
Iroh got started with IPFS-style content-addressed blob transfers as the primary way to use it, still has that functionality but its now a bit of a second tier citizen. See https://docs.iroh.computer/protocols/blobs
Besides just p2p streams seem to be much more useful, those are plug-and-play into most software, e.g. I wrote https://github.com/magik6k/git-remote-iroh that just plugs the git remote proto into iroh and lets you move repo commits between computers by just copying a string from one place to another on push. Doing that with blobs - not gonna happen, not that easily.
We realised that there are many more use cases for p2p streams than for blobs, so in the last year we have focused on getting iroh to 1.0, which involved implementing our own multipath QUIC implementation based on quinn. This was a lot of work and took the full focus of the team.
That being said, we plan to continue to work on blobs and get it to 1.0, which will involve some API changes and some internal changes, primarily to the blob store.
The blobs network protocol itself is just BLAKE3 verified streaming with a few tiny modifications (chunk groups) for efficiency, and hasn't changed since 2 years. Not because we don't have time for it but because it is done.
My personal goal is to have blobs working so well that you can forget about it, and also provide a solution for global content discovery.
All the protocol needs at this point is a DHT and a standard representation for directories. Everything else like data storage layouts and node trust systems can be handled client side.
The way I would put is as: Iroh + iroh-blobs == libp2p + UnixFS + Bitswap, and the latter three are some of the critical components that have defined most IPFS implementations.
IPFS does/did more than just peer to peer, which is all Iroh does, eg decentralised file sharing.
Something quite similar to Iroh but meant for more than a VPN over the internet: is Reticulum. Which is a custom network stack and meant to run over any connection type (TCP, UDP almost anything you can get a program to input and output data over, down to LoRa) using Interface connections.
Although the main implementation is in Python currently and mainly available only over Reticulum (no client side script "NomadNet Micron pages") and rngit for Git over RNS itself (intended kinda as a self host Reticulum Git forge with "workdocs") as well a (sometimes, normally every major release, updated) GitHub mirror. And another caveat is that the LXMF messaging protocol and LXST voice call protocol doesn't directly support group messaging currently.
IPFS, Freenet, and experiments like that mainly serve as a place for people to store and distribute pirated copyrighted material, child porn, hit lists, terrorism manifestos and plans, and the like.
Scratch a libertarian and, nine times out of ten, you'll find someone who advocates for no or minimal government because they want to do something the government legitimately bars them from doing. Scratch a libertarian decentralized P2P E2EE communication project and you'll find... well, this kind of material nearly every time.
Your local computer hard drive can also be used to store all of the above. Are you also okay to make it scannable by anyone?
Worse you can store child porn as paper pictures in your house and can privately communicate in there with other unknown people and mignt even be do something illegal there. Do you want to install some police security camera in your toilet?
Oh, and in some countries being LGBTQ+ person or political activist or women right activist is illegal and will land you to execution on chop chop square. Should we also let all the governments find these people too?
> a libertarian decentralized P2P E2EE communication project
Your argument makes sense for Freenet (though I'd personally defend that project too); but not so much for IPFS.
Firstly, IPFS doesn't have any encryption (E2E or otherwise).
Also, Freenet spreads data around the network (for robustness and plausible-deniability), so the peers providing a file are not the peers which inserted it. IPFS does no such thing: if you want your content to remain available, you'd better be running an IPFS node that provides it.
Either way, it feels like a pretty bad idea to host dodgy stuff on IPFS.
IPFS is much closer to HTTP. The difference is that content is immutable, and can be re-hosted by anyone that happens to have a copy (e.g. no need for mirrors, etc.).
(Note that HTTP was invented to disseminate physics research; not CSAM)
Love DASL (funded by IPFS too)! Iroh also meets the DASL spec (https://dasl.ing/bdasl.html). A great bridging opportunity for agents to build interop between many different content addressed systems!
Iroh is great! As is ATProto! Both build on DASL (https://dasl.ing/bdasl.html) - which specifies the core content addressing layer of IPFS.
However - important clarification about the Shipyard post that I think a lot of folks are confused by:
While its sad to see the Shipyard team sunset, the IPFS project is decentralized & robust to a single party moving on. IPFS the project/network is not sunsetting or shutting down!
Current focus is lighter-weight stewardship from the IPFS Foundation via grants to individual maintainers, & development of decentralized public infra tools like the Service Worker Gateway.
This is really unfortunate. When cloudflare dropped IPFS you could say this next step was sort of already on the way. I may be biased but I think when IPFS decided to put so much time into "IPNS" in order to support non-static webapps years ago what they came up with did not fit the need. And without webapps on IPFS things were going nowhere.
A year or so ago I wrote IPFS-boot which allows serving webapps on IPFS while providing also an update path and without breaking content hashing:
But now if you want to serve a secure webapp and not use IPFS IMO the only option you have is to tell users to install Tailscale and to host the webapp themselves and then to install Tailscale on all devices.
I agree that IPNS has always seemed a bit naff; but alternatives naming systems can be used too (if your system's name resolver can understand them); e.g. this uses pkarr addresses for IPFS content: http://www.chriswarbo.net/blog/2026-05-08-pkdnslink.html
Regarding an "update path", GNS has support for that built-in; though I've not been able to try it myself, since I can't get GNUNet to bootstrap :-(
I always thought that they should have used ENS instead of whatever coin they ended up making. GNS is cool but IIRC (years ago) it had no incentive mechanism which is I think where a lot of these solutions fall down. Even imaginary "ratio points" that p2p file sharing sites have being using for years work better than "donate your resources out of the goodness of your heart".
Half baked comment but I feel like many of these efforts are too purist. Sure they need to think more carefully about incentives from a systemic angle but also why not accept a hybrid design that doesn't depend on those in the first place? For example plenty of people operate their own nameservers for their own websites to use, or spin up a VPS to support [thing] they make use of. So at a minimum I'm sure webring-style infra where you cover for your friends and they cover for you would work quite well.
For a real world example of a hybrid approach that works see bittorrent where torrents can optionally contain urls that point to alternate download sources in order to speed up the initial seeding phase.
My personal opinion is that any notion of "incentive mechanisms" for IPFS is bullshit: whether Filecoin, or otherwise.
There is already a perfectly good incentive mechanism: if someone wants to host some data, they can; and if nobody wants to host it, it doesn't get hosted.
That's worked perfectly well for HTTP, without any shitcoin needed. The advantage of IPFS is that its URLs resolve to anybody who cares enough to host that data; so links will only 404 when nobody cares (unlike HTTP, which relies on a single point of failure).
I think parent is talking strictly about P2P, so you'll need (typically) something to help you tunnel between clients, as there are NATs and all sorts of things between two typical consumer computer at two different homes.
It kinda feels like the AWS or Azure of file distribution, so much stuff so confusing. Also apparently with Protocol Labs owning several of those things despite not operating those things?
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.
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
New technology has always benefitted first and foremost those in power, simply because people who get to extract wealth from the rest of society can then direct that wealth to acquire new tech first. This was equally true in pre-capitalist societies, or in USSR for that matter.
Being cynical about the tech itself is a bridge to nowhere, though, because it does not preclude its existence or usage, it just cuts you away from any benefits that you can personally get out of it - but you're still affected by all the downsides.
Don't be cynical about tech. Be angry at the people who want to own it all and use it to exploit you.
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.
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).
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.
> The only reason it’s decentralized is because blockchain and crypto was hype 10 years ago.
IPFS is not "blockchain" or "crypto"(currency).
It's much closer to git-over-bittorrent. Note that both of those things were decentralised long before "blockchain" and "crypto" existed.
The makers of IPFS also made a crypto thing called Filecoin; but that's a different project. Avoiding IPFS because of crypto is like avoiding the Web because of social media.
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.
That's not what we were talking about here. But as long as we're on this tangent I hardly think using a VPN constitutes a high bar to clear. There are still plenty of jurisdictions remaining in the world that in practice don't care to enforce copyright law against individuals (or sometimes at all).
Evidence? But also, so what? By definition the VPN will be exiting in a country tolerant of the conduct in question. It's also possible to purchase from an operation headquartered there, or even to directly purchase a VPS.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can not say IPFS was a bad idea. Consider GitHub: it is a massive content-addressed store with a smiley on it. There has been some very hot P2P products, e.g. Tailscale. Protocol Labs had its peak during/after the ICO, but long-term, (1) they did not focus on some particular audience and (2) performance of the network was not great. I personally believe that their bet on DHT was not the right one (I worked in this area long before IPFS btw). OK, in retrospect we are all wise.
See I thought if IPFS was picked up by the piracy scene (some bigger private trackers for example) then it probably would have been more successful. Alas I haven't seen it outside of libgen and even there I thought it was a backup option only.
I always thought it could be the evolution of Bittorrent: updatable torrents (with IPNS), peers sharing files from different "bundles" as long as the bits match.
The problem was that there was no good client for it that was better than current torrent clients. When I tested it you had to keep a duplicate of the files in the ipfs cache directory and the client was CLI based which would alienate most users. There's probably no way to have private trackers or to track seed/leech ratios for communities too.
It was also pretty slow (download rate wise), even if the destination and source node had a good link between them. I think the protocol had a lot of back-and-forth chatter, requesting blocks a few a time.
Arweave on the other hand will be getting some traction from the GTA 6 leaker. It's not good for all use cases because you need to buy storage with crypto instead of just running your own node but for small, valuable, rarely updated and heavily targeted files (like a website with illegal links) it's perfect.
I've always found Sam (one of the founders) to be a really good guy. I remember we went bouldering in Berlin when a lot of the early Arweave concepts were still coming out of his skull and we worked out a lot of it in conversation between boulder problems.
I wasn't aware of the relationship between Shipyard and Protocol Labs but it looks like Protocol Labs spun out maintenance and development of a lot of core IPFS technology to a new company called Shipyard, with the idea of cordoning off what was a cost center to Protocol Labs, and the hope was that Shipyard would be able to find other sources of revenue beyond the services funding they got from Protocol Labs.
I'm personally quite disappointed because I just built an IPFS based system built on top of Kubo that I was hoping would take off. Now this throws future maintenance of Kubo into question.
Always found ipfs and the whole "web 3.0" company to be incredibly obtuse to work with especially compared to previous peer to peer networks like bit-torrent.
I could never shake the feeling there is an unnecessary layer of grift embedded in all the protocols.
Optimized for throughput and large files. It's slow to start, downloads chunks in random order and there is no standard way to link torrents together. It's a bad fit for anything that's supposed to replace the traditional web.
Contact tracker (2 RTT UDP), contact some peers (2 RTT TCP, 1 RTT handshake, 1 RTT piece request and response, assuming a very small file). That's 5 RTT, about on par with HTTP 1.1 and TLS (though there's no TLS here).
Existing bittorrent software is heavily optimized for batch downloads of big files, but that isn't in the protocol.
> If you have a favourite memory of working with Shipyard, or an idea you always hoped IPFS would eventually achieve, we’d love to hear it. Google Form
One important thing I'd like to see IPFS or a similar decentralized web technology achieve, is getting rid of the necessity of filling out a Google form in order to tell the Shipyard people what I think about their maintenance of IPFS.
Seriously it bugs me when people who ostensibly care about decentralized or privacy technology use a centralized service hosted by a gigantic tech company to accomplish a task because it's convenient (if you already have an account with them), and don't even try to make a decentralized version available. It would have been better if they simply invited people to send them an email.
It's a problem for the entire ecosystem that the most expedient thing to do, the thing that we should have sympathy for them picking under a time of stress, is the thing that relies on people who want to communicate with them having a Google account and having that communication intermediated through Google with no alternative. And since the entire point of Shipyard as an organization is to be stewards of the decentralized web software ecosystem, the fact that they're not using decentralized web tech is relevant to their mission and values.
I could (sort of) see why you might get this upset if people were required to have a Google account themselves to submit this Google form, but that's not the case. Who are you to tell an underfunded opensource dev company that just lost their biggest project what tools they should use? That email you hypothetically sent will probably get delivered to an account in their Google Workspace, how on earth is that any different?
I've run into a lot of Google forms for projects that do in fact require me to log in with a Google account in order to submit, which I think might be related to Google detecting that I'm using a VPN and treating the submission as higher-risk. I just have this reflexive assumption that if something is presenting me with a Google form, it's not gonna work unless I log into a Google account on my local machine. Which is ultimately the reason I care about this kind of thing.
It's not their job to cater to your nitpicking. Even if this Google form didn't work over a VPN (which it totally does), you're capable of turning the VPN off if you really want to submit feedback. But it doesn't even sound like you have any feedback, so what's your problem?
I think it's a perfectly valid complaint about the ecosystem at large. Not a criticism of the individuals or of this specific case to be clear, but a broader observation that this isn't how things ought to be according to a certain set of ideals and the question then of why we keep seeing it over and over. Clearly there's some sort of systemic shortcoming that applies to the entire ecosystem.
This is honestly just the nitpickiest complaint of all. Criticizing people who just found out they're losing their jobs for which solution they use to collect fond memories from their users is an outrageous thing to get upset over. Just don't fill out the form.
Imagine if all the energy spent whining on the purity of a system being insufficiently private or decentralized or somehow loyal to a fight against the man, was spent instead on actually improving those systems. They're open source.
I wonder what distinguishes these kinds of communities over others. Some, like 'decentralization' or 'privacy' or 'security', require absolute adherence. If you're building a decentralized tool or a privacy tool or a security tool you must first reinvent the universe. Post on HN? Centralized, privacy nightmare, insecure. Use Gmail as your email provider? Centralized, privacy nightmare, insecure. Fastmail? Centralized. Run your own mail provider? Cool, on a cloud? Centralized, privacy nightmare. On your own infra? Centralized, bus factor 1.
Sort of an interesting market signal. "Don't bother building for me unless you're absolutely pure". Funny stuff.
Making a google form requires more effort than "send me an email at mailto://feedback@shipyard.com". The email body can even be prepopulated with the feedback template. Its really not a high bar, and thus disheartening that the people that should care, seemingly, dont.
What makes/made IPFS special was how it could be seen with relative ease on the standard internet. That feature allowed it to bypass censorship. I cannot say I am surprised that the funding was not re-upped since it seems like the modern web really loves censoring the crap out of things.
Edited: I also liked how it bypassed the traditional domain system.
These are good qualities in general; but it's worth asking why this anti-censorship technology required funding from one organization (Protocol Labs) that could cut off that funding and now has done so. Being economically non-viable without grants is one way that anti-censorship technology is ineffective at its stated goal.
I'm currently on sabbatical looking for volunteer work. I always thought IPFS was an interesting project, might be happy to pitch in some of my now-free bandwidth.
I don't think the problem was a lack of effort. The tech was interesting and innovative but the foundation of it had limits that were extremely hard to work past. As a technology it laid a lot of groundwork for better ideas, but I doubt it's worth investing in.
I tried to build a few non crypto decentralized apps. The killer was reliable always deliverability inside the browser. https://inbrowser.link/ was a huge jump in utility but came to late the ipfs.js just never worked consistently. In the end the only way to get good XP for yours users was that you provider the IPFS to http gateway for all content but then whats the point its just decentralization theater.
I remember in 2015 having the IPFS concept blow my mind its such a memorable moment when it really felt like someone designed something significantly different that current mainstream paradigms.
But in the end it seems like it was still a case of a cool technology looking for a use-case not solving a real problem.
Agreed. I was deep in the ecosystem, did the confs, shipped some apps. It’s hard to think of a use case that would be reliable now. Maybe some kinda file sync that is torrent like but http
> In the end the only way to get good XP for yours users was that you provider the IPFS to http gateway for all content but then whats the point its just decentralization theater.
I gave my static photo album website image files paths that consisted of /ipfs/ as directory name and ipfs hash as file name.
Brave browser was able to figure out that this meant they were available on IPFS, and asked me if i wanted to load the files from IPFS instead of from the web server itself.
So over time if hosting files on IPFS got popular, it could have been used automatically by browsers later to load the files from IPFS instead of the web server of the site. Saving bandwidth for the website operators and distributing storage of content which might also help it remain available for longer time.
That sort of thing would have been one great outcome, for example, where this sort of hosting your own http gateway for your own IPFS files makes sense like I was doing. Mind you, the web server setup for this was completely straightforward and requires no running of the IPFS services on the web server itself. On the web server it really was plain old directories and file names. As long as they are real IPFS hashes. And calculating the IPFS hash itself I did on my laptop when adding photos.
Very sad to hear in this thread that Brave browser has actually removed IPFS support :(
I wonder if (in theory) it wouldn't make more sense to address this sort of thing at the system resolver level rather than in the browser, the way tor does.
Deeper OS integration would be nice, but harder to roll out. I think the plan early on was to make something useful/generic/agnostic enough that a couple of big browsers would add support, then it could try becoming a Web standard.
Unfortunately that hasn't panned out; but it still feels more feasible than getting Microsoft and Apple to add it to their OS network stacks.
I tried to query a lot of resources (NFT images, many of which are/were hosted on IPFS) from IPFS myself using the official Go server, running on some pretty fast/wide hardware, for a good part of 2021 and 2022. It was a dumpster fire. Here are two specific problems that I remember, though I ran into several more. First, the UDP storm that it created somehow broke my network, where all of my switches gave up and just started sending all of its traffic to all of the nodes on the network. That could have been a "me" thing but it really made it hard to trust. I ended up having to give that server its own VLAN. Second, the caching was brain dead. By default, it would write every resource to the cache even if I was just using it to download them to a local directory, so it wrote everything twice. Even worse, when the cache was full, it would just drop the whole cache, which created huge spikes in IO util. I ended up patching the app to remove caching.
It felt like a really cool demo that never got cleaned up to work as a real production product.
Remember Filecoin? The original concept was that you could buy perpetual storage with a one time payment. It was funded by a crypto asset which was a derivative of mass storage prices, or something like that. Lighthouse supposedly sold such a product.[1] They no longer do.[2]
Is anyone aware of where IPFS community discussion is taking place? The forum seems almost dead and the community page has broken discord and matrix links.
Arweave does what it's designed for right now. When cyberleek came out I went looking for a gateway that wasn't censoring them, found one and downloaded the files using another gateway just to find out if it works (yes it did). You can't do that with a centralized system.
For the endowment setup no one knows if their economic thinking will hold up 100 or even 10 years in the future, so the claims that it's permanent are impossible to verify. I wouldn't call it a scam but I'm not fully convinced.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 7.4 ms ] threadtried to be the change I wanted to see
given where the concept actually found staying power (liquidity pools, instead of collectibles) it wholly needs a new name
“NFT” is distracting at this point, they should just called them 721-structs so people don’t get distracted by the fumbled poorly implemented art use case
I still think it's pretty obvious that on sufficiently long time-scales that some variant of NFTs will be the winner for event tickets.
right now outside of the web3 space, all promotion companies release tickets in different ways. the ability to resell them is unknown, the quantity for sale is unknown and opaque, the service fees make no sense for the last 20 years, the ability to transfer them is unknown, and the ability to lose your money on an attempted resale transaction is absurdly high. in comparison, all NFTs in the blockchain space inherit solutions to all of those problems and all marketplaces are just UI's on top of data already there in a uniform way, alongside new problems that are mostly education based and won't be solved with a different user experience (akin to how debit and credit cards introduced new problems with automated teller machines many decades ago, that never were solved but didn't deter the concept)
can a centralized marketplace and issuer that conforms solve all of it? of course, but that hasn't been the rubric for nearly a decade....
developing in the blockchain space isn't to attract non-blockchain users - at least for anything that actually earns revenue - its solving frictions for existing blockchain users because they are there, numerous and its lucrative
it's a parallel economy that you either accept the existence of or you don't, there are a lot of people trying to act like it has merged with other economies or asking you to use a big stake of money on blockchain assets with the hope that it becomes a bigger stake of money if they did merge, but that's really a distraction that has little to do with what's already happened and functioning fine
The image is a wholly separate thing that a token points at, and multiple tokens can point at the same thing just fine. NFTs be be funge-free but images are fully fungible.
Insane.
I think a lot of the AI skepticism comes from the fact that the last major New Thing (tm) pushed by this industry was crypto. People are very, very burned by that.
That and how badly social media turned out, but that's a whole different discourse.
What would I have owned exactly? What would have ownership entitled... All very reasonable question. Mostly entirely ignored or handwaved...
And of course there's no reason why a NFT has to be used to represent ownership of some kind of digital art - there are other uses for NFTs, such as modeling transferable network permissions or resources.
Ultimately NFTs are a just a specific application of blockchain technology, to represent some kind of resource on a blockchain which could in principle be digital art. If people care about ownership of NFTs representing digital art, that's a social fact about what kinds of art there is market demand for; and whether it matters that the bytes of the digital art are on a blockchain or linked from somewhere else (where they could get taken down or bitrot) is also a social fact.
I actually agree that treating NFTs that merely contain a link to some bytes elsewhere that worked at one point in time is a pretty dumb thing to care about, or have a market for (and the use cases for NFTs where the bytes are actually on-chain are, at best, fairly limited, although I wouldn't say completely nonexistent). And certainly the NFT market of 2021 or so, which had a lot of such NFTs, was driven by a weird social mania and people attempting to grift upon that social mania. This has never bothered me though, because I feel the same way about many markets for physical pieces of art; and ultimately it needs to be possible for people to create markets for things I personally think are dumb or at least don't care about.
There is a difference between markets for things I don't care about and markets for things I do care a lot about, just not in a positive way. I don't think it's necessary to allow an open market exchange for phone scammers, for example, and it has nothing to do with how uninterested I am in buying people's information. Not all NFT had to fall towards that kind of thing, it's just there was so little practical usage actually being done that 99% of it ended up being that way.
https://bafybeihpjhkeuiq3k6nqa3fkgeigeri7iebtrsuyuey5y6vy36n... was a random example
> Protocol Labs is an innovation network driving breakthroughs in computing to push humanity forward. PL connects more than 750 tech startups, funds, accelerators, foundations, open source projects, service providers, and other organizations.
What happened to them? Seems like they drank their own "Web3" Fla-Vor-Aid.
For anyone wondering, there are more sustainable (with a viable, focused business backing the project) options to do p2p, namely Iroh - https://www.iroh.computer/ which was built by ex-IPFS ex-Protocol Labs devs (I have no relation to the team beyond having worked with them back in the day).
Sadly Protocol Labs is doing.. ehh whatever now, except apparently supporting the projects it got its VC/crypto funding from.
If you want full ipfs functionality, we have a number of protocols you can combine: blobs https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-blobs and gossip https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh-gossip .
There is one thing we do not have yet - global content discovery. The reason for this is that so far we have not found a way to do it in a way that just works.
It is a very hard problem, but I hope we can come up with a solution so we can cover the use cases that initially got me excited about IPFS many years ago.
And also working to replace the Radicle's networking stack with Iroh: https://radicle.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/369274-General...
Besides just p2p streams seem to be much more useful, those are plug-and-play into most software, e.g. I wrote https://github.com/magik6k/git-remote-iroh that just plugs the git remote proto into iroh and lets you move repo commits between computers by just copying a string from one place to another on push. Doing that with blobs - not gonna happen, not that easily.
We realised that there are many more use cases for p2p streams than for blobs, so in the last year we have focused on getting iroh to 1.0, which involved implementing our own multipath QUIC implementation based on quinn. This was a lot of work and took the full focus of the team.
That being said, we plan to continue to work on blobs and get it to 1.0, which will involve some API changes and some internal changes, primarily to the blob store.
The blobs network protocol itself is just BLAKE3 verified streaming with a few tiny modifications (chunk groups) for efficiency, and hasn't changed since 2 years. Not because we don't have time for it but because it is done.
My personal goal is to have blobs working so well that you can forget about it, and also provide a solution for global content discovery.
The way I would put is as: Iroh + iroh-blobs == libp2p + UnixFS + Bitswap, and the latter three are some of the critical components that have defined most IPFS implementations.
Something quite similar to Iroh but meant for more than a VPN over the internet: is Reticulum. Which is a custom network stack and meant to run over any connection type (TCP, UDP almost anything you can get a program to input and output data over, down to LoRa) using Interface connections.
Although the main implementation is in Python currently and mainly available only over Reticulum (no client side script "NomadNet Micron pages") and rngit for Git over RNS itself (intended kinda as a self host Reticulum Git forge with "workdocs") as well a (sometimes, normally every major release, updated) GitHub mirror. And another caveat is that the LXMF messaging protocol and LXST voice call protocol doesn't directly support group messaging currently.
inauthentic activity seems to move from one product space to another. in 3 years we'll be hearing about stripe shutting down openrouter for example.
IPFS, Freenet, and experiments like that mainly serve as a place for people to store and distribute pirated copyrighted material, child porn, hit lists, terrorism manifestos and plans, and the like.
Scratch a libertarian and, nine times out of ten, you'll find someone who advocates for no or minimal government because they want to do something the government legitimately bars them from doing. Scratch a libertarian decentralized P2P E2EE communication project and you'll find... well, this kind of material nearly every time.
Worse you can store child porn as paper pictures in your house and can privately communicate in there with other unknown people and mignt even be do something illegal there. Do you want to install some police security camera in your toilet?
Oh, and in some countries being LGBTQ+ person or political activist or women right activist is illegal and will land you to execution on chop chop square. Should we also let all the governments find these people too?
> a libertarian decentralized P2P E2EE communication project
Your argument makes sense for Freenet (though I'd personally defend that project too); but not so much for IPFS.
Firstly, IPFS doesn't have any encryption (E2E or otherwise).
Also, Freenet spreads data around the network (for robustness and plausible-deniability), so the peers providing a file are not the peers which inserted it. IPFS does no such thing: if you want your content to remain available, you'd better be running an IPFS node that provides it.
Either way, it feels like a pretty bad idea to host dodgy stuff on IPFS.
IPFS is much closer to HTTP. The difference is that content is immutable, and can be re-hosted by anyone that happens to have a copy (e.g. no need for mirrors, etc.).
(Note that HTTP was invented to disseminate physics research; not CSAM)
However - important clarification about the Shipyard post that I think a lot of folks are confused by:
While its sad to see the Shipyard team sunset, the IPFS project is decentralized & robust to a single party moving on. IPFS the project/network is not sunsetting or shutting down!
Current focus is lighter-weight stewardship from the IPFS Foundation via grants to individual maintainers, & development of decentralized public infra tools like the Service Worker Gateway.
A year or so ago I wrote IPFS-boot which allows serving webapps on IPFS while providing also an update path and without breaking content hashing:
https://github.com/rhodey/IPFS-boot
But now if you want to serve a secure webapp and not use IPFS IMO the only option you have is to tell users to install Tailscale and to host the webapp themselves and then to install Tailscale on all devices.
Regarding an "update path", GNS has support for that built-in; though I've not been able to try it myself, since I can't get GNUNet to bootstrap :-(
For a real world example of a hybrid approach that works see bittorrent where torrents can optionally contain urls that point to alternate download sources in order to speed up the initial seeding phase.
There is already a perfectly good incentive mechanism: if someone wants to host some data, they can; and if nobody wants to host it, it doesn't get hosted.
That's worked perfectly well for HTTP, without any shitcoin needed. The advantage of IPFS is that its URLs resolve to anybody who cares enough to host that data; so links will only 404 when nobody cares (unlike HTTP, which relies on a single point of failure).
It kinda feels like the AWS or Azure of file distribution, so much stuff so confusing. Also apparently with Protocol Labs owning several of those things despite not operating those things?
Ironically seems quite a fragile setup.
Regardless, very sad news.
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.
Being cynical about the tech itself is a bridge to nowhere, though, because it does not preclude its existence or usage, it just cuts you away from any benefits that you can personally get out of it - but you're still affected by all the downsides.
Don't be cynical about tech. Be angry at the people who want to own it all and use it to exploit you.
btw,I thought it was an Initial Coin Offering, not an actual fundraise.
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.
IPFS is not "blockchain" or "crypto"(currency).
It's much closer to git-over-bittorrent. Note that both of those things were decentralised long before "blockchain" and "crypto" existed.
The makers of IPFS also made a crypto thing called Filecoin; but that's a different project. Avoiding IPFS because of crypto is like avoiding the Web because of social media.
I guess the user base has proven this out in the end. Torrents are good enough.
But that didn't pan out.
An ICO is a type of fundraise.
About 800k unique DHT clients are seen weekly.
You are going to see a lot more shutdown posts around decentralized or federated technologies if you do not support those tools.
See: https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/Cryptograss:Delivery-kid
If IPFS is starting to wane, does anyone else have a suggestion of a replacement about which I might start to educate my fans?
The problem was that there was no good client for it that was better than current torrent clients. When I tested it you had to keep a duplicate of the files in the ipfs cache directory and the client was CLI based which would alienate most users. There's probably no way to have private trackers or to track seed/leech ratios for communities too.
Maybe I need to put my music on Arweave.
I'm personally quite disappointed because I just built an IPFS based system built on top of Kubo that I was hoping would take off. Now this throws future maintenance of Kubo into question.
I could never shake the feeling there is an unnecessary layer of grift embedded in all the protocols.
Existing bittorrent software is heavily optimized for batch downloads of big files, but that isn't in the protocol.
One important thing I'd like to see IPFS or a similar decentralized web technology achieve, is getting rid of the necessity of filling out a Google form in order to tell the Shipyard people what I think about their maintenance of IPFS.
Seriously it bugs me when people who ostensibly care about decentralized or privacy technology use a centralized service hosted by a gigantic tech company to accomplish a task because it's convenient (if you already have an account with them), and don't even try to make a decentralized version available. It would have been better if they simply invited people to send them an email.
This is the last gasp of a blockchain hype cycle solution that never found its problem.
Sort of an interesting market signal. "Don't bother building for me unless you're absolutely pure". Funny stuff.
Edited: I also liked how it bypassed the traditional domain system.
- ATProto ecosystem (built on IPFS content addressing, used by Bluesky): https://atproto.com/guides/tutorials
- IPFS contribution guide: https://docs.ipfs.tech/community/contribute/contribution-tut...
- libp2p maintainers call (networking layer of IPFS & other p2p networks): https://libp2p.io/get-involved/
I remember in 2015 having the IPFS concept blow my mind its such a memorable moment when it really felt like someone designed something significantly different that current mainstream paradigms. But in the end it seems like it was still a case of a cool technology looking for a use-case not solving a real problem.
I gave my static photo album website image files paths that consisted of /ipfs/ as directory name and ipfs hash as file name.
Brave browser was able to figure out that this meant they were available on IPFS, and asked me if i wanted to load the files from IPFS instead of from the web server itself.
So over time if hosting files on IPFS got popular, it could have been used automatically by browsers later to load the files from IPFS instead of the web server of the site. Saving bandwidth for the website operators and distributing storage of content which might also help it remain available for longer time.
That sort of thing would have been one great outcome, for example, where this sort of hosting your own http gateway for your own IPFS files makes sense like I was doing. Mind you, the web server setup for this was completely straightforward and requires no running of the IPFS services on the web server itself. On the web server it really was plain old directories and file names. As long as they are real IPFS hashes. And calculating the IPFS hash itself I did on my laptop when adding photos.
Very sad to hear in this thread that Brave browser has actually removed IPFS support :(
Unfortunately that hasn't panned out; but it still feels more feasible than getting Microsoft and Apple to add it to their OS network stacks.
It felt like a really cool demo that never got cleaned up to work as a real production product.
Remember Filecoin? The original concept was that you could buy perpetual storage with a one time payment. It was funded by a crypto asset which was a derivative of mass storage prices, or something like that. Lighthouse supposedly sold such a product.[1] They no longer do.[2]
[1] https://www.lighthouse.storage/blogs/Permanent%20Storage%20P...
[2] https://www.lighthouse.storage/pricing
For the endowment setup no one knows if their economic thinking will hold up 100 or even 10 years in the future, so the claims that it's permanent are impossible to verify. I wouldn't call it a scam but I'm not fully convinced.