Came here to say pretty much the same thing. It's slick and easy to use. It's actually the 'dropbox' I've always wanted and if they introduce a storage limit I'd pay.

https://keybase.io/jgrahamc

What's also impressive is doing away with Dropbox's clunky "selective sync". While having everything stored locally sounds like a good idea at first, as you store more and more data is gets less and less user-friendly; in other words, power-users get the worst user experience.

Additionally, creating an easy way to share files with friends without taking up their quota is awesome. This looks like it could be a very, very powerful competitor to Dropbox.

At one point OneDrive used a similar approach, and power users loved it.

But they've since moved away from that in favor of Dropbox-style selective sync for reasons that didn't seem very convincing to me. [1]

[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/11/onedri...

Not storing files locally sounds like a good idea at first - you don't have any syncing issues. But nobody has a perfect always-on internet connection. Having files local is worth the occasional sync cockup.

Oh for sure there's a reason that approach is dropbox's default - its really hard for people to understand their files aren't really "there".

That said, my point is more that for people who start storing 100GB+ of data, it becomes harder and harder to actually manage which bits you want at any time.

Yeah. 1 GB Free + $.XX per additional GB would probably be the best model for them, at least looking at it from the outside.

> We're giving everyone 10 gigabytes.

>There is no paid upgrade currently. The 10GB free accounts will stay free, but we'll likely offer paid storage for people who want to store more data.

I was implying they should lop of the 0 and go with 1 free GB.

I'm looking forward to group sharing, on-premise caches, etc.

Maybe this is a tangental question, but wouldn't it be relatively easy for dropbox to implement this?

Or are you saying you prefer the command line interface?

Given Dropbox's absolutely glacial pace of feature progression, no it would not be easy. I mean, all of dropbox runs off of one set of private keys...

https://www.dropbox.com/en/help/28

Dropbox works with the NSA to hand over customer data. You are absolutely right that something like this would go over like a turd in a punchbowl at Dropbox HQ.

Unlike Google, Microsoft and Slack, Dropbox does have the top, 5 star, EFF rating for protecting your data from the government... I'm not sure what more they could be doing.

Edit to add link to EFF ratings: https://www.eff.org/who-has-your-back-government-data-reques...

Are we THAT forgetful? http://kiledjian.com/main/2013/6/7/nsa-is-using-google-faceb...

Dropbox was listed on PRISM documents. Are you kidding me?

They could do client side encryption.

Their profitability depends on being able to dedupe and compress data across all customers. They would need to raise prices significantly to make client side encryption a built in feature.

You trust the end users to back up their private keys?

I don't care what other people do. I want client side encryption!

Then use tarsnap already. Bonus: it is owned by our own cperciva.

tarsnap is nerdish, secure and reasonably priced for what it provides IIRC. Haven't used it though but expect someone would have yelled out here if it was bad. (In fact the only one I've seen bashing it was patio11, -because it was too cheap and too nerdish.)

tptacek also complains that tarsnap is too nerdish. :-)

At least on Linux/OSX/Android, you can use encfs to have a encrypted directory tree.

Spideroak can do it without private keys to back up.

Thanks for adding facts. Do they still have that questionable(?) politician on the board?

As the recent Schrems case in the CJEU said, any data held in the USA is no secure.

By all means, just make stuff up. You've come to the right venue.

I like the social proof, I like the crypto, I like the command-line as well.

Asking for an invite as well. Email in my profile. Thank you John, or whoever has any invites left!

email NOT in your profile...

I'd appreciate an invite too, if you have one - vmarsi75-hn at yahoo dot com. Thanks!

i'm 8 hours behind but would love an alpha invite! =) my username at gmail

Hi John, mind sharing an invitation?

I have no shame... I would love an invite if you're not exhausted already.

Best of luck with this thing you're building. I haven't been excited about any tech stuff in ages. This is really cool.

Send an email to the address in my profile. I have some invites left.

If there's any left, kind sir.

Sent to email in your profile.

hi, could you please send me an invite if you have some left ? many thanks !

no email in your profile...

Email in profile, would like an invite as well... Edit: no longer necessary, got one through twitter

I'd take an invite as well if anyone sees this, thx :) edit: Email in profile

Hey! Any invites left? (Email in profile)

Got it :)

Would also love an invite, thanks!

i would also like an invite please. [myusername] @ gmail.com

Thanks bro. Appreciated it.

ah, just added it. may you please ? thank you !

Just sent you one. Have a nice weekend,.

Am I too late to ask for an invite as well?

I'd really appreciate an invite, too.

you have no email in your profile

oh, whoops, I thought I had it in there. I did get an invite, though, so no need to worry.

I'd also love to check it out :)

Sent you one :)

Love an Invite! Really looks slick :D

I'd love an invite too!

(email in profile)

I didn't see an email. If you still need an invite, shoot me an email.

I got an invite, thank you though!

I also would love an invite

Your email address is not in your profile.

Could I get an invite too? I really love the premise of this project! Thanks

One more please?

no email in your profile

Hi, also would love an invite, thanks! (email in profile)

Jumping on the invite begging train (email in profile)

Sent you one.

Love to get on the invite train too (Email in profile)

Would love an invite please. Thank you.

Same here. Would love an alpha invite.

Thank you!

Me too please?

I would love an invite too (email in profile)

I was going to send you one, but... I can't find your email in your profile.

weird, it's in my profile. anyway, here it is dida1337 at yahoo.com

That email isn't public, I think. In any case, you should have one now.

Hi John, I also would love to test it out! https://keybase.io/flaviotsf

Thank you so much and congratulations on the release!

Another shameless request from me if any are floating around :) Happy Friday!

if you'd still like an invite, what's your email address? [email protected]

I'm out of invites now

I have one invite left (for some reason I never got more than ten invites). Drop me an e-mail. First come, first served ;).

Gone!

Shameless request from me as well. Thanks!

here's another shameless coder begging for an invitation

If anyone else wants an invite, I have a few left: email in profile.

All my invites are gone, sorry (and wow! did a lot of people email; there's a huge demand for Keybase)

I'd love an invite please (email in profile)

if you'd still like an invite, what's your email? [email protected]

another shameless request for an invite, mid-project and am very excited by what keybase is doing here. thanks!

Count me in as one of the people who are excited. If you don't mind, Can I also get an invite?

So IPFS with cryptography? Although, since Keybase still has a copy of the data, its closer to Dropbox with crypto.

https://ipfs.io

I don't think it's distributed in the IPFS fashion, right?

Which makes sense, of course, since Keybase is a funded startup that needs to capture value... and, well, centralized file sharing is a more straightforward solution, too.

The file system thing seems really cool and useful. I'm a fan of Keybase and will recommend this to people with whom I need to share sensitive data.

It'd be interesting to hear the Keybase people talk openly about how they see their role as both infrastructure providers for an open web of trust, and an economic entity that requires for its survival some degree of lock-in and centralization.

Which makes it pretty much boring from my perspective. Give me The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) -> https://ipfs.io/

IPFS alone is usable for the public web, but is not usable for private sharing. You need a social identity-oriented public key infrastructure with a good UI. That is Keybase, and it's incredible that we have this now. Sure, we should implement an IPFS backend for the storage part. But let's not neglect the huge progress the Keybase folks have given us.

Well, what I'm hoping for from Keybase is enough user friendly tooling to encourage a lot of people to start using public-key cryptography. I don't see IPFS as really addressing any of that, even though it is extremely cool and valuable in other ways.

I love the ideas behind IPFS, but it isn't even trying to solve the same problems as KeyBase, so comparing them like this is very silly. Users may be able to benefit from both in different ways, or even use parts of the two together in the future.

I'm not speaking for Keybase, but their approach so far is to fill these roles in compatible ways.

As an infrastructure provider, they open source the client software and design it to trust the server as little as possible. They also endeavor to document the behavior of the server so that, in theory, you could build your own Keybase-compatible server.

As an economic entity, they're positioned to tackle the issues that open source projects usually face, like support, development resources, UI design resources, and "where do you put all of this encrypted data" by getting their most needy users (mostly businesses) to pay them.

We are working on "IPFS with crypto" for Peergos: https://github.com/ianopolous/Peergos

Does it scale well?

I mean, if I want to do some Torrent like P2P stuff, I need to...

- gather public keys of all the people who want to download from me

- encrypt every chunk for every person separately

The second part is usually handled by encrypting a randomly chosen symmetric cipher key using each public key, and then encrypting the file with a symmetric cipher. And I believe keybase was founded to tackle the first problem.

>Along with Zcash

Have you read about Monero or Bitcoin + Coinjoin + Joinmarket?

I see lots of people asking me for invites to Keybase in this thread. Sorry, I can't help, I'm all out. I gave away the 9 I had super-fast.

A bit offtopic, but what do you like about Zcash, and what's different from Bitcoin?

Zcash is an actually anonymous cryptocurrency (BitCoin is not, since senders and receivers are public). The crypto is definitely impressive (which it is, it uses zero knowledge proofs -- which are really cool math -- for a lot of its sending operations).

I see, thanks! I'll look more into it, it sounds interesting.

By the way, how did you manage to install Keybase FS? It won't work for me at all.

I managed to find the prerelease packages in the build scripts, and got it working through that. Make sure you restart the keybase service, as it doesn't happen automatically

https://s3.amazonaws.com/prerelease.keybase.io/index.html

I love you.

EDIT: Still doesn't work, unfortunately. I get the /keybase dir, but it's empty.

This needs to be more visible in this thread.

I'm not the grandparent, I don't have it installed. :P

Can you spare an invite please?

PSA to people asking for invites: make sure your email is in your HN profile.

Added my mail just for this :) can you spare an invite? Thanks :)

I would also love an invite if possible!