[HN Gopher] Building Permanent and Censorship-Resistant Blog wit...
___________________________________________________________________
Building Permanent and Censorship-Resistant Blog with Ethereum ENS
and IPFS
Author : pawurb
Score : 184 points
Date : 2021-06-29 08:16 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (pawelurbanek.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (pawelurbanek.com)
| Proven wrote:
| It's very secure from attacks because nobody knows it exists.
| jokoon wrote:
| I would rather be interested in a database system over IPFS or
| similar where you can update data, with both public and private
| encrypted data. Freenet is good, but it's not a database system,
| and it's pretty complex.
|
| Bitmessage is also pretty awesome already...
| kangaroozach wrote:
| This would be in line with my question about an ipfs commenting
| capability. I guess a database on ipfs could support commenting
| and dynamic data over ipfs.
| kangaroozach wrote:
| But maybe there is a hybrid here. Like perhaps you use a
| regular database in a fully encrypted manner where ipfs holds
| the encryption keys. So your ipfs website relies on a
| centralized database where the data stored is totally
| encrypted and protected from censorship...
|
| But I guess as long as that data is centralized it could be
| censored.
| jokoon wrote:
| A decentralized database would be versioned, a little like
| GIT.
|
| In essence, only valid queries would be transmitted and
| replicated across peers.
|
| It would not be a single ledger, it would be a collection
| of ledgers. Data that is often queried would have higher
| short term redundancy, that would face over time. Any data
| submitted would be have at least 10 or 25 copies across all
| clients, and data would be found through a DHT.
|
| I guess public data would be encouraged since visible by
| everyone, but private encrypted data be limited. Trust and
| data moderation are also problems.
| Geee wrote:
| There is SkyDB on Sia Skynet: https://blog.sia.tech/skydb-a-
| mutable-database-for-the-decen...
| lifekaizen wrote:
| Have thought the same thing but have not seen access control
| implemented well[0] so been working on just such a thing[1]
|
| [0]https://github.com/textileio/go-threads/issues/295
|
| [1]https://github.com/collabswarm/collabswarm
| superkuh wrote:
| The most censorship resistent blog is one that doesn't use any
| resources owned by a third party. Unless you're rich that
| generally means hosting from your home computer.
|
| It's simple, It's effective (for most non "web scale"/commercial
| use cases), and it's legally safe.
| folkhack wrote:
| ISPs typically block 80 and 443 and have clauses in the service
| contracts that put some nasty language around self-hosting.
| klaudioz wrote:
| I did something similar using https://fleek.co/ using a nuxtjs
| template I edited in my GitHub repository:
| https://github.com/klaudioz/klaudioz.eth
|
| It was very easy to set. No code. My site is:
| https://klaudioz.eth.link/
|
| Also i bought the eth domain when the gas was a very low price.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Nice post, thanks for making it :)
|
| I'm always curious, though - there are some things that we want
| to censor for good reasons. The usual poster child (sorry) for
| this is kiddie porn. But there's other stuff - revenge porn,
| libel, etc that we as a society might want to censor. How do we
| do this on infrastructure like IPFS?
| exporectomy wrote:
| Whoever's hosting it can still be found by law enforcement in
| the usual ways. Or maybe more idealistically we change society
| to remove all those taboos about people's bodies.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| OK, so someone posts a video of a child being abused. The
| person is prosecuted, tried, found guilty, and banged up for
| the rest of their days. What happens to the video?
|
| Because if the answer is "it stays accessible" then this
| technology is fundamentally broken and we need to stop using
| it or promoting it immediately.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I tend to agree with your comments here, but note that it's
| not an easy answer: I don't think this problem only indicts
| technologies like IPFS, but also E2E encrypted
| communication services like Signal and WhatsApp. Are those
| also "fundamentally broken and we need to stop using them
| and promoting them immediately"? Maybe so, but it seems a
| heavy lift to me.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Yes, as I've said elsewhere, I think we need to have a
| discussion about E2E and law enforcement. In order for
| our legal system to work, we need to have some access to
| "private" communications.
|
| I do get the need to prevent governments snooping on
| journalists and protesters. But I think there's also a
| valid need for access to evidence for our justice system
| to function properly. If we can't convict people without
| evidence (rightly), and we can't force people to
| incriminate themselves (rightly), then we must be able to
| access evidence somehow.
| hytdstd wrote:
| This isn't a totally hypothetical question, unfortunately:
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/20/child-
| abu...
| long_time_gone wrote:
| I'd say child porn being illegal is more idealistic than the
| alternative.
| adrianN wrote:
| Taboos about people's bodies and the right to not have
| pictures of yourself posted to the Internet are fairly
| orthogonal.
| Nursie wrote:
| Images of child abuse are not a "taboo about people's
| bodies".
|
| Wow.
| [deleted]
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > we as a society might want to censor
|
| Before the internet, all of that stuff could be (and was)
| published using traditional printing presses and distributed
| like everything else that was printed. We dealt with the
| outliers then the same way we ought to deal with them now: find
| and prosecute (or sue, in the case of libel) the people that
| were responsible for publishing them, not try to outlaw the
| printing press itself for not having a "no bad stuff" backdoor.
|
| Because, really, if somebody comes up with a truly uncensorable
| distribution platform, the point of whether or not it can be
| used to distribute "bad stuff" will become moot: it will be
| uncensorable by definition, and we'll _have_ to go back to the
| "old way" of handling the edge cases.
| necrotic_comp wrote:
| There's the unfortunate reality where if you make one thing
| censorable, you make the entire thing censorable ; there's no
| notion of only letting the 'good stuff' through.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I think there needs to be. Because the consequences of
| keeping the bad stuff accessible are worse than the
| consequences of censoring the good stuff.
| necrotic_comp wrote:
| Conceptually, though, how would it work, and who becomes
| the arbiter of what's good and what's bad, and what can be
| shared and what cannot ?
|
| In no way shape or form am I defending the nasty stuff or
| saying that it should be allowed, but when defending
| privacy and liberty, there's a real question about how we
| deal with hidden lawlessness that uses the same tools
| people use for legitimate purposes, or, more importantly,
| how people use these tools in a way that a government views
| as illegitimate or a thought crime but are in the defense
| of liberty.
|
| I think there's a notion of policing that comes out of this
| discussion that is not part of the technology but rather a
| complement to it. I don't know what shape that would take.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Well, that's where we have laws, and elections, and all
| that stuff.
|
| We similarly have a complete ban on violence, except for
| the state which has a monopoly on it. This does get
| abused sometimes, the system isn't perfect. But it's
| better than allowing anyone to use violence whenever they
| want to resolve disputes.
|
| I agree that there's a discussion that we technologists
| need to have about policing and censorship, which we're
| currently not having.
| fleddr wrote:
| Such complement cannot really exist. If it will exist and
| actually be effective, the technology as a whole would be
| pointless.
|
| An analogy can be made to WhatsApp. It's known to be used
| to coordinate terrorist attacks in Europe yet not a
| single government intelligence agency has managed to
| legislate Facebook into opening a back door. Because a
| backdoor makes encryption quite pointless.
|
| Similarly, the case with Apple. Whom categorically
| refuses an unlock ability to authorities, and so far has
| won.
|
| There's no public outrage. The public seem happy to be
| protected from the prying eyes of their governments. And
| I guess the public implicitly accepts that as part of
| this protection, some very nasty stuff goes around these
| same platforms.
|
| That's why I believe we should separate content
| extermination (which is fully impossible) from hiding
| said content from view. The latter is doable and common.
|
| For example, terrorist videos are almost immediately
| removed from social media platforms upon detection. This
| stops it from spreading and its damage and shock effect
| is contained. However, should you specifically seek out
| such videos, they can still be found in several places,
| and you don't even need to go to the darkweb.
|
| Censorship, in the practical sense, should be seen as
| hiding from view. Not deletion.
| uncomputation wrote:
| From what I've seen, you would basically just unpin or
| force unpin undesirable content. As long as no one
| requests that content, it will be garbage
| collected/deleted.
| smabie wrote:
| Really? The bad stuff is already accessible.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Countries which have more censorship tend to end up being
| less desirable places to live than places with less
| censorship, and I dare say that a country with no
| censorship at all would be better than a country where the
| government has complete control over all media (even if
| both of those scenarios would be worse than the average
| liberal democracy).
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I disagree, having lived in countries with pretty severe
| censorship (e.g. Australia), and countries without (e.g.
| Cambodia). I think this truism is actually false.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I'm not sure how you are measuring censorship levels, but
| Freedom House ranks Australia as "Free" with a score of
| 76, and Cambodia as "Partly Free" with a score of 43, in
| their latest Internet Freedom Scores:
|
| https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-net/scores
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Well, Australia's Federal Police raided the state
| broadcaster [0] and has a whole bunch of laws against
| hate speech that get regularly used. While Cambodia
| really only cares about whether or not you say bad things
| about the ruling party on Facebook. It depends on what
| you consider "free speech" I guess.
|
| I think the larger picture here is that censorship really
| doesn't impact how pleasant a place is to live in. I
| currently live in Berlin, and there's a whole heap of
| sensitive history here, but that doesn't really affect
| you if you just want to live a normal life.
|
| [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-48522729
| dane-pgp wrote:
| I think it is misleading to cherry-pick an extreme
| example of the Australian government getting a search
| warrant to look for copies of leaked defence documents,
| while ignoring Cambodia's complete crackdown on
| independent newspapers[0] and radio stations[1].
|
| Even more worrying is Cambodia's recently introduced
| internet censorship decree, which "requires all internet
| traffic in Cambodia to be routed through a regulatory
| body charged with monitoring online activity before it
| reaches users."[2]
|
| [0] https://freedomhouse.org/article/death-press-freedom-
| cambodi...
|
| [1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/9/22/cambodia-
| switching-...
|
| [2] https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/02/18/cambodia-
| internet-censor...
| netr0ute wrote:
| There's no way to if the system is designed specifically to be
| uncensorable, but maybe you could blackhole routes on the BGP
| level.
| amelius wrote:
| People have been adding censorship-resistant data to the Bitcoin
| blockchain too.
|
| https://internetofbusiness.com/bitcoin-blockchain-contains-i...
| habibur wrote:
| We need an open standard for blogs, like email or news servers.
| Everyone publishes on their own server of choice and it gets
| fully replicated through API from server to server -- who ever
| subscribe to whom.
|
| Banned from a server? Post on another one or your own server from
| where subscribers will pull your posts. Digital signatures for
| validation.
|
| Publishing the specs will suffice. As developers can come up with
| various implementations based on it.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| That sounds a lot like ActivityPub and the Fediverse.
| deregulateMed wrote:
| Email has a spam issue. Lots of junk. Lots of false positives
| for spam.
| habibur wrote:
| You subscribe to servers or users that you like to follow.
| Similar to Twitter/FB. Unsubscribe those that you don't like
| or are spammy.
| chriswarbo wrote:
| Sounds like Secure Scuttlebutt http://scuttlebot.io
| Taek wrote:
| The reality is that we aren't very close to a world where
| everyone runs their own servers. Maybe we'll get there some
| day, but that feels at least a decade away.
|
| We built an alternative platform called Skynet, which allows
| anyone to host decentralized webapps like blogs, or even more
| advanced things like chess tournaments. There's a design
| pattern called a DAC that makes it easy for multiple frontends
| to use the same data, without anyone needing to learn a data
| spec.
| [deleted]
| paulpauper wrote:
| "permanently censorship resistant"
|
| "requires cloudflare"
| RhodoGSA wrote:
| only requires cloudflare if your node goes down. Also, you can
| use the coin to incentivize others to host your info.
| vmception wrote:
| > On Firefox and Chrome, you can add support for eth domains via
| a Metamask extension
|
| This has never worked for me
|
| Is there supposed to be some advanced setting not on by default
| in Metamask that allows .eth domains to resolve?
| cdiddy2 wrote:
| you have to add https:// before the .eth domain. otherwise it
| just googles the address I have found.
| vmception wrote:
| that worked, thanks!
| pawurb wrote:
| Sorry, I might have mixed up Metamask with
| https://unstoppabledomains.com/extension
| vmception wrote:
| no, metamask works, just needs https://. unstoppable is for
| some other extensions
| pawurb wrote:
| Thanks, I've updated the post to reflect that.
| dimes wrote:
| It would be much better to store the blog content directly on the
| blockchain. This is very expensive to do on Ethereum, but should
| hopefully get cheaper over time.
|
| Is IPFS really resistant to censorship? It seems like any state-
| based actor could easily block access to IPFS nodes if they were
| serving a specific CID.
| Taek wrote:
| I could be incorrect, but my understanding is that the DHT used
| to route through IPFS is not robust to attack. A bunch of nodes
| could join the DHT and start maliciously routing data in
| circles, and that would be a very low cost way to significantly
| disrupt data availability and uptime on IPFS.
|
| A few papers exist that describe byzantine fault tolerant DHTs,
| but they make assumptions about the percentage of evil nodes,
| which requires some method of authentication / Sybil resistance
| to be effective. Also the network cost blows up substantially,
| and DHTs already aren't very fast in terms of loading things
| like web pages.
| deweller wrote:
| It is not censorship proof but it is resistant to censorship.
|
| A state actor would need to block all IPFS hosts as soon as
| they begin to serve a specific CID. This is a game of whack-a-
| mole that would be difficult to maintain.
| hanniabu wrote:
| > but should hopefully get cheaper over time.
|
| It will get cheaper to "save" but more expensive to access
| fuj wrote:
| Does it work in China? Can a website hosted in ipfs be blocked by
| them?
| phantom_oracle wrote:
| I looked into this the last time someone posted about it here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27551619
|
| One thing I realized is how expensive Ethereum domains are. The
| domain price is equivalent to a regular domain and then you still
| have to pay the gas fee, which makes it more expensive than a
| casual .org or .net
|
| The other drawback of these censorship-resistant blogs is that
| they all require plugins to access the non-HTTP domain, which all
| but rules out most non-technical people who don't even know what
| HTTP is.
|
| And while it can still be accessed over HTTP, the bottlenecks
| become the same companies that might comply with censorship
| requests.
| fogof wrote:
| Well I guess it depends on the current price of gas. I was
| playing around with ENS on Ropsten and I estimated it takes
| about 1/2 a million gas to buy an ENS domain. At current gas
| prices that's ~$30USD, but this time last year it would have
| been around $5. With the per year cost of the domain being $5
| on ENS and About $12 on most of the registrars I looked at, it
| would have been better to go the ENS route (setting aside the
| gas cost of regularly updating the site, which I guess could
| also be avoided using IPNS, though it wasn't mentioned in the
| blog post so I am not sure about this).
| lalaland1125 wrote:
| One big issue here is scalability. If enough people start
| using ENS that gas price will go up significantly. Ethereum
| is fundamentally not scalable.
| mattdesl wrote:
| Not at present; sharding (part of Eth2) will change this
| scalability dramatically though.
| RhodoGSA wrote:
| >which all but rules out most non-technical people who don't
| even know what HTTP is
|
| This is why they call it web3. web1 had the same initial
| problems. Use Brave.
| textgel wrote:
| A possible counter argument at least to the plugin problem is
| that having the people who don't even know what HTTP is joining
| the internet was part of what led to the censorship problem in
| the first place.
| Taek wrote:
| There's a comparable stack using Skynet and HNS. HNS is a lot
| cheaper than Ethereum because it's a blockchain dedicated to
| domains, you aren't competing with things like yield farming or
| crypto kitties for block space. If fees are high, it's because
| a lot of people are buying names.
|
| Skynet is different from IPFS in that everything is hosted by
| paid servers, and it uses direct routing instead of a DHT, so
| you get a lot better latency. Skynet's IPNS equivalent (called
| SkyDB) is also a lot faster, p999 on the order of 200ms to
| update something.
|
| The other nice thing about Skynet is it's all http accessible.
| Anyone can run their own Skynet portal, and that portal by
| default serves over http. You can grab any content from any
| Skynet portal, and there's even an upgrade in development that
| will automatically find alternate portals for you if requests
| fail.
| roenxi wrote:
| If they are using HTTP without knowing what it is, then their
| understanding of protocols is quite possibly not the important
| part of the puzzle.
|
| I'd struggle to explain what IFPS is but I can follow the link
| just fine.
| noman-land wrote:
| You might be dealing with outdated price information. I just
| picked a random available 6 letter domain "prider.eth" and it
| costs ~$5 a year with a ~$12 fee. That means you can register
| an "unstoppable" domain for a decade for ~$62 at this moment.
| $12 seems like a pretty reasonable fee for such a service.
|
| Secondly, you need specialized software for HTTP, it's called a
| web browser. There are browsers that have (or will) have native
| eth/ipfs support. I think Brave already does out of the box.
| People will download whatever app their friends are using, even
| if they have no idea what's going on underneath.
|
| The HTTP gateways for all this stuff are only so "legacy" tech
| can communicate to that world. It's a bridge, not a
| destination.
| JamilD wrote:
| > And while it can still be accessed over HTTP, the bottlenecks
| become the same companies that might comply with censorship
| requests.
|
| This is something that bothers me about the state of dapps
| right now. The way many of them connect to the blockchain is
| via Infura (a centralized service); even Metamask uses Infura
| to connect to the blockchain. There's this abstraction that you
| trust, that you're working with something totally
| decentralized, but right now the technical constraints
| necessitate single points of failure or censorship.
|
| Of course, the data is still there in the blockchain,
| decentralized over many nodes, but the way we access that
| information seems very, very brittle.
| noman-land wrote:
| This is very true. Like I said in another comment, the HTTP
| gateways are bridges, not destinations. It'll only take one
| or two bridge collapses before people wise up and move to
| sturdier ground.
| mattdesl wrote:
| This is true; but there are multiple entry points to that
| data (The Graph, Infura, etherscan, etc) and just because one
| fails does not mean the entire ecosystem will collapse (ie:
| you can easily create a new indexer and switch HTTP provider
| from Infura to NewInfuraReplacement), or even run your own
| node for your company.
| rektide wrote:
| From the article,
|
| > In addition to the cost of the domain ($5/year), you have to
| pay the gas fees.
|
| Who does the $5/year go to? What incurs gas fees? Registration
| & updates? Updates are mentioned below:
|
| > One downside is that each data update costs money, ~$1.5 at
| the time of writing.
|
| Are initial gas fees higher?
| hanniabu wrote:
| > The other drawback of these censorship-resistant blogs is
| that they all require plugins to access the non-HTTP domain,
| which all but rules out most non-technical people who don't
| even know what HTTP is.
|
| All .eth addresses are resolved by cloudflare with the .link
| tld, so hn.eth could be visited as a normal site with
| hn.eth.link
| EastSmith wrote:
| Until Cloudflare is required by law to unlink something.
| hanniabu wrote:
| I'm sure they do have a blacklist, and for those hiy can
| run the infrastructure yourself if you want to view those
| gentleman11 wrote:
| Let's say the entire internet switches over to this. Does it
| keep up in performance, does it slow down as use becomes
| ubiquitous - or does it become faster?
| noman-land wrote:
| More people is actually an asset to protocols like IPFS
| because everyone who downloads the data also serves it to
| others, so actually the more popular something is, the easier
| it is to get.
|
| Likewise with ENS, all the data is stored locally on your
| local copy of the chain, so it doesn't matter how many users
| are making queries because each one is only querying their
| own node.
|
| Also users are serving files to each other in an offline-
| first ecosystem. From that perspective it could be faster and
| more reliable as well.
| asenna wrote:
| It's all a matter of time. The plugins are a current workaround
| for when browsers don't natively understand IPFS content.
|
| But the rate of growth of this space and with browsers like
| Brave gaining some traction, I won't be surprised if Firefox
| starts natively supporting Web3 tools at some point in the
| future and that would make Google and Apple think about it as
| well.
|
| Definitely will take time but this seems like the logical next
| step given how far this tech has already come in the last 5
| years.
| handrous wrote:
| How's IPFS on mobile? I'd expect it _either_ eats battery
| _or_ is slow. Maybe both.
| pawurb wrote:
| You can access https version of an ENS website without plugins
| by using a `link` suffix:
|
| https://pawelurbanek.eth.link/
| samb1729 wrote:
| Resources on the page at that URL still load from your .com
| domain - will Cloudflare serve those too?
| pawurb wrote:
| Looks like I've left some absolute paths by mistake. They
| should also be served by IPFS.
| sva_ wrote:
| >And while it can still be accessed over HTTP, the
| bottlenecks become the same companies that might comply with
| censorship requests.
|
| As the OP said, you're just back to relying on a centralized
| service
| viraptor wrote:
| Kind of. eth.link breaks the chicken and egg problem. Early
| adopters can stand up visible pages this way and provide
| signal to browsers for future inclusion by default.
| [deleted]
| ernopp wrote:
| Nice post.
|
| For permanent storage you should check out
| https://www.arweave.org/ rather than IPFS + centralised pinning
| services like Pinata. With Arweave you pay a small upfront fee to
| have the network store your file forever.
|
| It's the promise of IPFS+Filecoin but actually live and being
| used (eg by the Internet Archive). There's some decent tooling &
| docs for it too: https://github.com/ArweaveTeam/arweave-deploy
|
| Edit: Filecoin is also live and being used, I was out of date.
| https://docs.filecoin.io/store/
| pawurb wrote:
| Amazing, thanks I'll check it out!
| cle wrote:
| Filecoin is live and being used, could you clarify what you
| mean? See eg Textile, Fleek, etc. It is currently storing ~20
| PiB across ~1 million storage deals, according to
| https://storage.filecoin.io.
| ernopp wrote:
| Thanks, I didn't know. I've updated my original comment
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| I read the Filecoin docs and it completely fails to explain
| the economic incentive. Can someone fill me in? Miners
| receive Filecoins as reward for storing people's data, who
| pay Filecoin to access their files. So... the only use for
| Filecoin is to gain storage access? Why would a miner, who by
| definition _has storage,_ want a currency that can only buy
| more storage? Is there something _else_ one can buy with
| Filecoin? According to Coinbase, Filecoins are "worth $50",
| meaning they can be traded for dollars?
| smabie wrote:
| they can just sell it? What's the problem there?
| Anon1096 wrote:
| People who want storage but don't have it must first buy
| Filecoin, which creates a market to exchange Filecoin to
| and from other (crypto or not) currencies. Miners sell
| their Filecoin on that market.
| exporectomy wrote:
| Looks like you may be able to use IPFS addresses with data
| stored in Arweave so that Arweave becomes effectively one of
| the several redundant hosts you might use with IPFS, if I
| understand it right.
|
| "This Arweave+IPFS bridge allows you to have truly permanent
| backing of your data using Arweave, while also making it
| available in IPFS." [1]
|
| [1] https://arweave.medium.com/arweave-ipfs-persistence-for-
| the-...
| kangaroozach wrote:
| Forgot about this. Thanks!
| cwkoss wrote:
| > With Arweave you pay a small upfront fee to have the network
| store your file forever.
|
| How are the economics of this sustainable? "Forever" hosting
| for a small upfront fee seems like it must be a lie.
|
| Can you only upload small files, so you end up paying 1000x+ S3
| prices, with the hope that Moore's law outpaces cost of keeping
| the file online?
|
| Are reads monetized, so unpopular files will inevitably lose
| the forever guarantee?
| cwkoss wrote:
| Seems like distributed file systems have a 'choice triangle':
| permanent, cheap or "doesn't allow hosting child porn" -
| choose one.
| bsamuels wrote:
| the fee pays into an endowment. the endowment is only paid
| out to miners if the block reward in USD terms is too low to
| justify storing the full weave.
| cwkoss wrote:
| So, if block reward value grows more slowly than the stored
| data, the endowment gets drained and when it hits zero the
| system implodes?
|
| Seems like an obfuscation of the economic problem that
| doesn't solve it.
| bsamuels wrote:
| the size of the fee is a function of 1) the amount of
| data you wish to store and 2) the estimated cost of
| storing the weave between the current time and the end of
| the storage period ("forever" is actually assumed to be
| about 200 years for these purposes).
|
| If you were to store 100 TB on the weave tomorrow (the
| weave is currently 10TB), the block reward would remain
| the same, but the endowment payout would trigger much
| sooner.
|
| The endowment fees are sized with the assumption that the
| endowment will have to pay out immediately and until the
| end of the 200 year period.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Ah, that makes sense. I think their 'sales pitch' would
| be more compelling to more technical users (which I
| assume is the main initial demographic) if the 'forever's
| had asterisks and the 200+ year assumption was
| prominently displayed on landing page.
|
| That shifts my expectations from "economically infeasible
| lie" to "small fee may not be so small, but feasible with
| proper stewardship and valuable for certain use cases."
|
| In the crypto/DeFi space, superlative marketing copy is
| more likely to be interpreted as 'potential scam' than
| other domains IMO.
| kangaroozach wrote:
| Anyone know of any commenting systems that work on IPFS? In
| theory how would this work? Could there be some distributed
| application that stores individual comments on ipfs and serves as
| some type of routing mechanism or lambda function to aggregate
| comments into a master thread which can be continuously updated
| as a static files stored on ipfs?
| dane-pgp wrote:
| One of the building blocks for such a system might be something
| like:
|
| https://webmention.io/
| chriswarbo wrote:
| WebMention requires a server, so it would have all the same
| problems as other approaches.
|
| The fundamental problem is that when a page is created, we
| don't know what address the comments will get (since it will
| be based on their content).
|
| We can easily look _backwards_ , from a comment to all of the
| previous thread, e.g.: Page <- 1stComment
| <- 2ndCommentB <- 3rdComment <- ...
|
| The problem is those arrows only point one way; we need to
| know a name/URL for a comment, rather than the page. To solve
| this we need a mutable reference, like DNS, IPNS, some third-
| party service, etc. If we have that, there are lots of things
| we could use to accumulate and render comments (like
| WebMention).
| uncomputation wrote:
| Say the page is "Hello world!" (CID:
| `QmXgBq2xJKMqVo8jZdziyudNmnbiwjbpAycy5RbfDBoJRM`), then the
| comments can "point to" this CID `QmXgB...` and so on. The
| problem to me is not necessarily the direction of the graph
| but the existence of this graph at all. IPFS seems to have
| no method of creating "references" to other hashes, but if
| it did then I can see comments working unless I'm missing
| something.
| chriswarbo wrote:
| Yes that's exactly the problem: comments can include a
| reference to the page (via its URL); they can also
| reference any comments they're replying too (via their
| URL). Those URLs are the 'arrows' that I drew.
|
| > IPFS seems to have no method of creating "references"
| to other hashes
|
| Such references would be arrows pointing the other way.
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