Is that unusual?

Development of IPFS slowed to a crawl when most of Protocol Labs switched to working on Filecoin. It remains to be seen if either Filecoin or IPFS will ever be viable for their intended purpose.

(I say this, and yet I know it isn't true in practice. But why isn't it true?)

filecoin is also promoting in China. https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/T0Qt2CEP7QsA6Zy9Vzvdkw

https://bbb.fu.io/

You can run the following in the console to see all your peers

    for await (const peer of await node.swarm.peers()) { console.log(peer.addr.toString()) }

The contact info for these servers appears to be retrieved via the DNS rather than the DHT. This isn't surprising because browser clients can't participate in the DHT, but the DHT is currently one of the biggest weak points of IPFS. IPFS's DHT is so chatty that it consumes over a megabit of throughput just to maintain an idle node. Lookups are excruciatingly slow and often fail completely.

    $ ipfs dht findpeer 12D3KooWJxNHY6zE1KnzFdBJrTMCbhCVNtSLvjp7qR5Wsp49DnUC
    /dnsaddr/ipfs.scalable.io
    /dns4/ipfs.scalable.io/udp/4001/quic
    /dns6/ipfs.scalable.io/tcp/443/wss
    /dns6/ipfs.scalable.io/udp/4001/quic
    /dns4/ipfs.scalable.io/tcp/443/wss

I regret ever building a pinning platform on IPFS. The worst thing is that, when I expressed my frustration on Twitter about an IPFS release completely breaking IPNS updates, the founder called me a Karen.

The last time I tried it (maybe 9-12 months ago) it was a real resource hog (including choking the network) and really slow.

One could also imagine IPFS over Tor.

IPFS gateways (and Tor-to-Web) are reverse proxies, they are configured at the server-side to accept connections from the public Internet and route traffic to IPFS (and Tor), and they distribute content to the public Web. As far as I can see, this is a problem, someone can send DMCA notices, asking the gateway operators to take files down from the Web. The only protection I see is DMCA Section 512 (a.k.a Safe Harbor Provision), the operators are not liable for things solely hosted on IPFS, which is good, but gateways must comply with the takedown notices. So I think it's entirely possible for Cloudflare to put a huge blocklist on its IPFS gateway, and for smaller gateways that don't have the necessary resources to handle the requests, be DMCAed out of existence entirely. In the 2000s, RIAA launched campaigns against eD2k servers and BT trackers, including the use of honeypot servers to collect information. RIAA was not ultimately successful, but it created a major short-term disruption (eventually new servers would always appear in a different jurisdiction). A similar campaign against IPFS gateways sound possible if the publishers decided to launch an aggressive crackdown like the RIAA. The question is only a matter of whether the decision is made.

I'm not saying that IPFS requires the use of IPFS gateways, they don't, and in a sense, gateways are counterproductive for the decentralization goal. But they do currently provide an useful service for the Web, and I'm just speculating whether a major disruption is possible.

Well, then we might need something like IPFS-over-Tor, using Tors anonymity features to make it more safe for operators.

https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/37

https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/124

So you could validate it if you wanted to. Because the URL _is_ the hash, if you did validate it you could be very sure that it is correct.

If a webserver hosts a file, how can you be sure that file is correct? Sometimes the ship a sums file next to it. At best this can find corruption, but it would not find malicious files.

Maybe IPFS can introduce a feature to generate one-time URLs, e.g. `oneTimeURL = f(realURL);`.

Websites then can generate new URLs for example every hour or even for each client request. Copyright bots will file a DMCA request to a URL which only they have.

It kind of worked for MegaUpload. Their founder got rich and a version of the company still exists. However, the founder is also gradually losing a long court battle and may find himself extradited to the US where he will face significant jail time.

It's a politico-technological arms race. Governments make laws. People don't agree with them so they create technology that subverts the government. The state must then become even more tyrannical just to maintain the same level of power. We'll end up with either an uncontrollable population or a totalitarian government.

I don’t know, do you think nobody has noticed LibGen by now? Do you think the reason they’re still running is because of some jurisdiction issue? Even the lawyers would be wrong on that one.

I'm not sure about the implication of your words. But, clearly, Elsevier has already tried to take legal actions against LibGen previously, and once in a while, LibGen's domain names are still being blocked and routinely replaced, just like Sci-Hub. I'd still say the reason it's still running is a jurisdiction issue, or let's say it's a geopolitical issue, it's using Russia to shield itself away from US influences.

But an IPFS gateway hosted in the United States by Cloudflare does not enjoy these legal and political benefits.