This seems like one of the few instances where that might not be true. Does a quick screenshot deserve to take up space on IPFS forever?
It seems like an optional expiry timestamp could be useful.
IPFS has garbage collection, if content is not requested from any peers, the peers will drop the content after some time.
So your screenshot will probably live a couple hours or days but not forever, that's not what IPFS does.
Other projects like Filecoin, Storj or Swarm are actually for long-term secure storage but you also pay for using that service.
If that data was found 1000 years from now, and entered into the system, the data would generate the same hash, and then be able to fulfill any hash requests.
Also, IPFS does data deduplication across blocks (chunks of 512KB - I believe), files, and directories. So if I share a source repo that uses someone else's repo, and they share it too, then my copy helps speed his files up as well.
There's an ongoing project to get OpenStreet Maps in IPFS, so that local areas have their own hash, all the way up to state, country, continent, and world. It's so the whol geographic repo could be shared amongst all, without the burden of storage on a single person or group.
https://github.com/ipfs/archives/issues/11
is the root isue on GH that made this project
https://github.com/davidar/ipfs-maps
And here it is in prod: https://maps.ipfs.io/?/ipfs/QmQ2YKnWpfjYQdoDN4KZjxL18K33nz2p...
No. Once a file has been hashed, that hash always equals that file. No. Matter. What.
Now, if no one else in the world has that file that equals that hash, then the content is dead.
But you can never remove things. It wouldn't make sense to do so.
>Do I have to have the daemon running forever?
You can run it as long as you want. But if you're the only hoster of certain images, then you quitting will mean those files can't resolve. But if your stuff is popular, other IPFS daemons will also provide bandwidth and capacity.
> Is it like pastebin for images? Am I anonymous or not?
It's like Pastebin, kind of. Your node is NOT anonymous, but the content itself can be. The content=hash , no matter who shared it.