Re:Filecoin Foundation Grants 50k FIL to the Internet Archive
by Groxx on Thursday April 01, 2021 @06:06PM
(#26666768)
They effectively are doing this, including with IPFS: https://dweb.archive.org/details/home
I'm not sure what the current state is though. And IPFS is basically just a protocol for storage, it doesn't ensure / encourage storage in any way - that's the point of filecoin.
Re:Filecoin Foundation Grants 50k FIL to the Internet Archive
by leoc on Friday April 02, 2021 @09:47AM
(#26671365)
It's also worth adding that the general idea of using distributed proof-of-work things in Internet protocols goes back quite a long way, to 1997 at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash : it's not just a post-Bitcoin/ICO-era notion.
Re:Filecoin Foundation Grants 50k FIL to the Internet Archive
by Groxx on Friday April 02, 2021 @01:39PM
(#26673726)
Yeah, I sincerely wish hashcash had succeeded, it seems like a viable route for nigh-eliminating spam.
Bitcoin's achievement isn't a radically new core algorithm of any kind, it's using existing stuff in a clever way, to make it self-reinforcing even when thrown at humans. (I mean, yea, that's an algorithm, but you get my meaning)
Re:Filecoin Foundation Grants 50k FIL to the Internet Archive
by pradn on Thursday April 01, 2021 @05:13PM
(#26666107)
You hit the hammer on the nail. IPFS urls point to content-addressable data. These URLs can be pinned by anyone running an IPFS node. However, what's missing is an easy way to "seed" lists of IPFS files with whatever storage you have. Ideally, there's a way for me to choose to contribute - say - 30 GB of space to a particular project, and the system will take care of pinning the most-needed files, up to that storage limit. This would be useful for any number of public archival projects.
I've seen efforts where people bring up a web page that tells you which torrents to seed, based on how many seeds are active. But this is manual work, and not too robust.
Re:Filecoin Foundation Grants 50k FIL to the Internet Archive
by kevincox on Thursday April 01, 2021 @05:18PM
(#26666164)
I was thinking that most people would just pin the content that is most interesting to them. But it would be also to pin the rarest content. There is no reason that both can't exist to capture multiple motivations.
- Sites are archived to IPFS.
- The URL -> Archive mapping is published in a merkle dag.
This way people can help mirror the archive (or subsets of it) by replicating the IPFS archive. You can also separately mirror the merkle dag which would be relatively small. If sites are fairly predictable you could even crawl it yourself and verify that it matches the data that archive.org reported (although there are probably many sites that change on every request so the hash won't match exactly, but you could at least do some analysis/manual inspection on the diffs to check that archive.org appears to be reporting correct data).