[HN Gopher] Cloudflare Distributed Web Gateways: Unlocking the W...
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Cloudflare Distributed Web Gateways: Unlocking the Web3 Metaverse
Author : elithrar
Score : 98 points
Date : 2021-10-01 13:06 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.cloudflare.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.cloudflare.com)
| muttantt wrote:
| Many are missing what Cloudflare is doing. They are taking over
| every aspect of the web and beyond. I see their market cap being
| $300B in less than 5 years easily.
| Navarr wrote:
| The "Semantic Web" is crying about having its Web 3.0 moniker
| stolen by blockchain
| kordlessagain wrote:
| What would be cool is to hook the Lightning Network up to NGINX
| to implement 402s with micro Bitcoin payments, in exchange for
| content or processing of some ML thing.
|
| The response code has literally been sitting there all this time,
| waiting for an implementation of crypto for access.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402
| thinkmassive wrote:
| Check out LSAT https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28459713
| xur17 wrote:
| https://lightning.engineering/posts/2020-03-30-lsat/
| jamescostian wrote:
| > Cloudflare has an advantage that no other company in this space
| -- and very few in the industry -- have: a global network. For
| instance, content fetched through our IPFS Gateway can be cached
| near users, allowing download latency in the milliseconds.
| Compare this with up to seconds per asset using native IPFS. This
| speed enables services based on IPFS to go hybrid. Content can be
| served over the source decentralised protocols while browsers and
| tools are maturing to access them, and served to regular web
| users through a gateway like Cloudflare. We do provide a
| convenient, fast and secure option to browse this distributed
| content.
|
| It's wild to see people who love the word "decentralized" also
| love it when an organization tries to _centralize_ a something
| that 's decentralized. It's really hard in these times to know if
| someone is trying to pump and dump for sure, or if they're being
| genuine.
| gfodor wrote:
| The terminal state of successful decentralized technologies is
| always going to be one where there are some large centralized
| nodes. This is true for the Internet, for Email, for the Web,
| and so on. So consolidation of crypto by the backing of large
| mainstream companies is just one more sign that it's here to
| stay.
| atrus wrote:
| If Cloudflare goes poof tomorrow though, IPFS will still work,
| albeit slower.
| pimterry wrote:
| > It's wild to see people who love the word "decentralized"
| also love it when an organization tries to centralize a
| something that's decentralized.
|
| I don't think that's a good description of what's happening
| here.
|
| IPFS content accessible via Cloudflare's gateway isn't
| dependent on Cloudflare itself at all. They're just acting as
| another equal peer in the network (albeit a widespread & well-
| connected one). If Cloudflare disappears, the content remains.
|
| It's exactly like a large organization providing extra seeds
| for a popular torrent - it doesn't take anything away from the
| rest of the network.
| jamescostian wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it totally different from a
| large organization seeding a torrent, because everyone
| downloading data from them is also likely seeding the torrent
| too while downloading it, while anyone using the gateway is
| not also storing any info on their machines?
|
| Won't this gateway make it less likely to have some sort of
| p2p app take off, because why help out peers at your expense
| when you can get what you want from Cloudflare at no expense?
| Or maybe I'm looking at IPFS wrong - I interpret it as
| something meant to become popular (meaning much more non-
| programmers would use it than programmers), but I suppose if
| it remains a small community like torrenting, then it could
| remain effectively decentralized despite Cloudflare's
| gateway, because of how many users are being peers instead of
| solely leaching
| sudhirj wrote:
| This view is not self-contradictory. It's possible to justify
| the statement that GitHub has been as much a net-positive to
| the software community as Git, although it's technically a
| centralisation of a decentralised system.
| jamescostian wrote:
| git has a narrow target market, which is developers. There's
| a high percentage of cloning, so if GitHub goes away all the
| data remains on people's machines.
|
| Things that are supposed to be able to become mainstream have
| to expect different users. They need to expect a ridiculously
| high amount of e.g. Cloudflare usage. Most people aren't
| developers. And things like Cloudflare's gateway make it
| _harder_ to sell "use this app that uses your phone's
| storage space to store things you like", because those cost
| storage space while Cloudflare is free. Sure, the systems can
| still be decentralized de jur, but de facto they are
| centralized. Git remains decentralized de facto due to the
| high percentage of git users who clone things.
|
| GitHub's codespaces definitely are super centralized, and if
| they became mainstream, _then_ I 'd argue that git is
| centralized de facto.
| Wallacy wrote:
| Its not like that.... If you send you code to github, then
| deleted that code in our computer, and github goes down
| before any other person cloned your repo and decided not
| delete, then you code is lost.
|
| You same question can be applied here: Why someone will
| download a random repo on the github and store just for
| fun? No one will do that without any reason. So, on git the
| only people that keep any file/repo offline, has any
| interest on that content to be hosted with then.
|
| The same here, if I send any file using IPFS, the same file
| will be accessible using any gateway, my own gateway, my
| neighbor, or some other that i dont know who owns in other
| part of the globe.
|
| The gateway is just a gateway. Its one way to find some
| asset on the network, and has a optional cache. Months ago
| I send one file using IPFS, then accessed via cloudflare
| (and others) gateway, then I deleted my file, and in few
| hours the file was inaccessible in every gateway that i
| tested. No gateway keep you file forever....
|
| But then can if they want, anyone can keep any block if
| they want. So, the same way as my previous example using
| git! The asset will exists util everyone that hold that
| asset want to keep, but because you cant control the others
| nodes, once some asset is public over the network, thats
| can be "forever" or just few hours.
|
| So... IPFS is more about in how you can share assets
| privately than the lifetime of the object. And with or
| without cloudflare IPFS is decentralized because at any
| point i can setup any gateway that can listen my assets in
| the same way (same hash) than any other gateway.
|
| IPFS gatway is much more about node discovery + cache....
| No centralization happens here. You can store third party
| blocks in you node if you want, or rely on other nodes if
| want, but thats is up to you. Its the same as upload
| anything to any cloud then delete the local copy.
| chromatin wrote:
| This indicates that Cloudflare are publicly announcing and
| soliciting application for beta access to their IPFS and Ethereum
| (JSON RPC) gateways. This is incredibly exciting, and, coupled
| with the recent R2 announcement, suggests they are very much
| going to be disrupting existing spaces AND defining new markets
| (as the Stratechery article also recently posted on HN also
| describes).
|
| Bullish on Cloudflare :)
| [deleted]
| impostervt wrote:
| So, it seems like you'd still need to use metamask (or similar)
| to store your keys and sign transactions. Then metamask (or
| similar) could call cloudflare to publish the transaction.
|
| Metamask is a giant pain for new users. I was hoping this would
| somehow get rid of it. Perhaps the browsers could integate this
| functionality.
| benatkin wrote:
| > Unless you happen to hang out with the Web3 community in Hong
| Kong, San Francisco, and London
|
| Pretty funny. I'm sure NYC and Seattle have blockchain dev scenes
| than London.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_technology_centers#Glo...
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(page generated 2021-10-01 23:02 UTC)