Incentives must be created for storing content. Imagine if each request was really more like a bounty where the requester would pay the host when the file is delivered.

I think "you host mine, I'll host yours" works better here than a financial incentive.

If you can specify "I've got 1gb spare to replicate other people's assets, as long as each of them replicates mine in return" then your incentive to replicate other people's sites is more redundancy and bandwidth for your own.

If you also prioritise files that have the least replicas across the entire network, and allow servers to re-distribute the content they are replicating, it would surely become quite hard for a file to be lost forever.

This makes more sense to me than having each site pay for their own data to be replicated, because those who don't pay don't get their content replicated, which results in missing content when the server eventually disappears. That is just as bad as HTTP.

> If you also prioritise files that have the least replicas across the entire network, and allow servers to re-distribute the content they are replicating, it would surely become quite hard for a file to be lost forever.

How would this stand up to an attack of uploading random data in large quantities?

This is what I'm saying. If there's a financial incentive to store popular content, or a higher incentive to host "at-risk" content this would work out, no?

I have no idea how hard this would be to implement. I'm new to ipfs and crypto.

The way it works is by using a smart contract so that content and payment can be exchanged simultaneously and payment is only delivered when the hash of the file matches what is expected.

That was supposed to be solved by FileCoin, i.e. financial incentives to keep content alive.

Yeah, I've been pretty disappointed by what they actually shipped. The concept (decentralized, financially incentivized storage) is really neat, and there would be a demand for it, but every time I've tried to use it, it's been incredibly difficult. Ran into similar problems with Sia.

Example: I'd love to use one of these projects as an additional backup layer for my NAS, but the technical complexity necessary to set it all up makes it.. feel very fragile. Definitely not set and forget.

My hope is that in 10 years something cool comes out of one of these projects, but we're definitely not there yet.

Filebase offers an abstraction layer to Sia, Storj and other decentralized networks. It's S3 compatible as well, so it plugs right into most NAS setups including Synology Hyper Backup and QNAP.

[1] https://filebase.com

I like the concept, but the cypherpunk in me wishes I didn't have to go through a centralized party to accomplish it. To me this is just another competitor, and there's no reason to use this over something like Backblaze.