<story><title>Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]</title><url>https://github.com/backender/filecoin-survey/releases/download/0.5/filecoin_survey.2.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cocktailpeanuts</author><text>I think the top comment for this should be about Filecoin, instead of just another uninformed comments about Bitcoin that we see here every day.&lt;p&gt;That said, one thing most people don&amp;#x27;t talk about is: I think most people think IPFS is disruptive, but I think IPFS itself is susceptible to disruption.&lt;p&gt;The main reason why IPFS is useful is because there&amp;#x27;s not an easy way to do NAT traversal therefore it&amp;#x27;s super hard for people to run their own server on their laptop or mobile devices.&lt;p&gt;IPFS introduces all kinds of technologies to get around this, but in my opinion the ability to freely set up your own server on your device is the core problem.&lt;p&gt;You don&amp;#x27;t really need a globally addressable immutable file storage, because unless you&amp;#x27;re dealing with static images, a lot of files DO change all the time, and people want to store and share files privately.&lt;p&gt;Which means, if there&amp;#x27;s a new type of technology that lets people do just that--set up their own server anywhere and make it accessible via HTTP--then I don&amp;#x27;t see why we really need IPFS. This could be done by startups or other protocols, but even by some innovative ISPs, which decide to change their business model to compete against edge nodes that capture most of the value (such as Google, Facebook, etc.)&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the reason IPFS is so hot nowadays is because it&amp;#x27;s riding the DApps wave where people want to build Ethereum apps with IPFS as a file storage. But after playing around with it a bit I think it&amp;#x27;s much better at this point to just use Github to host your file and use Ethereum as database because the whole point of immutable apps is in the data and transactions, not in the static files.&lt;p&gt;But I would love to be corrected. If anyone actually think IPFS is essential to DApps, feel free to correct me and educate me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kodablah</author><text>&amp;gt; Which means, if there&amp;#x27;s a new type of technology that lets people do just that--set up their own server anywhere and make it accessible via HTTP--then I don&amp;#x27;t see why we really need IPFS&lt;p&gt;I have a ton to say here, but I&amp;#x27;ll keep it to a few point. Tor onion services solve the setup-your-own-server issues, it&amp;#x27;s just not super easy yet. IPFS is needed regardless, because there is a need to distribute things when your  machine isn&amp;#x27;t up and to solve discovery. What IPFS doesn&amp;#x27;t have natively is anonymity (tho there are onion transports conforming to libp2p transport iface) and distributed compute, but neither is that important.</text></comment>
<story><title>Is Filecoin a $257 million Ponzi scheme? [pdf]</title><url>https://github.com/backender/filecoin-survey/releases/download/0.5/filecoin_survey.2.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>cocktailpeanuts</author><text>I think the top comment for this should be about Filecoin, instead of just another uninformed comments about Bitcoin that we see here every day.&lt;p&gt;That said, one thing most people don&amp;#x27;t talk about is: I think most people think IPFS is disruptive, but I think IPFS itself is susceptible to disruption.&lt;p&gt;The main reason why IPFS is useful is because there&amp;#x27;s not an easy way to do NAT traversal therefore it&amp;#x27;s super hard for people to run their own server on their laptop or mobile devices.&lt;p&gt;IPFS introduces all kinds of technologies to get around this, but in my opinion the ability to freely set up your own server on your device is the core problem.&lt;p&gt;You don&amp;#x27;t really need a globally addressable immutable file storage, because unless you&amp;#x27;re dealing with static images, a lot of files DO change all the time, and people want to store and share files privately.&lt;p&gt;Which means, if there&amp;#x27;s a new type of technology that lets people do just that--set up their own server anywhere and make it accessible via HTTP--then I don&amp;#x27;t see why we really need IPFS. This could be done by startups or other protocols, but even by some innovative ISPs, which decide to change their business model to compete against edge nodes that capture most of the value (such as Google, Facebook, etc.)&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the reason IPFS is so hot nowadays is because it&amp;#x27;s riding the DApps wave where people want to build Ethereum apps with IPFS as a file storage. But after playing around with it a bit I think it&amp;#x27;s much better at this point to just use Github to host your file and use Ethereum as database because the whole point of immutable apps is in the data and transactions, not in the static files.&lt;p&gt;But I would love to be corrected. If anyone actually think IPFS is essential to DApps, feel free to correct me and educate me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Dylan16807</author><text>Blog-ish websites are unreliable even when they have real hosting.  If you put it on someone&amp;#x27;s laptop it gets so much worse.  To me, the reliability boost is the killer feature of IPFS.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; You don&amp;#x27;t really need a globally addressable immutable file storage, because unless you&amp;#x27;re dealing with static images, a lot of files DO change all the time, and people want to store and share files privately.&lt;p&gt;While it boosts reliability, IPFS is not globally immutable.  If you share a file with a limited scope, it won&amp;#x27;t stick around forever.&lt;p&gt;Though from a quick search you can&amp;#x27;t easily keep a file private, that&amp;#x27;s not great.</text></comment>