IPFS has a ton of potential behind it, as it makes publishing, accessing and retaining content drastically easier than HTTP. The content-addressing also means you can basically sidesteps the whole act of “downloading”, no more need to download a file, extract a file, etc. You just access it directly in your file system by a unique name.
That said, I am also very pessimistic on it. IPFS suffer from “underspecification”. The protocol is completely focused on just moving bytes around. It doesn’t care about copyright or authorship, which becomes a huge problem due to content no longer having a real home in IPFS, everybody can pin, cache or share content on IPFS. It’s very much like Bittorrent in this regard, but worse as even Open Source licenses don’t help here. IPFS, unlike Bittorrent, doesn’t even guarantee that content will stay together, e.g. you can pin and reshare your favorite icon, without a hint of what license it is under or what icon theme you picked it from. For the time being everybody seems to just ignore the problem, but I think it will kill it if it gets popular before this problem is solved.
Another problem is that it’s just buggy and slow, especially when it comes to the fuse daemon that provides the /ipfs and /ipns directories. Though that at least is fixable on the client side. The copyright problem might not without some fundamental changes to the protocol itself.
It doesn’t care about copyright or authorship, which becomes a huge problem due to content no longer having a real home in IPFS, everybody can pin, cache or share content on IPFS.
No it doesn’t. Maybe in some places? But not in most. You can break copyright laws with pen and paper, which don’t have any protection against it and are perfectly legal
I think that would go against the philosophy of ipfs. Sticking drm on top of it would crash with the intended self-archiving capabilities and censorship resistance, as well as with the whole point of a decentralized network since some entity or entities would have the power to block or delete content from it
IPFS has a ton of potential behind it, as it makes publishing, accessing and retaining content drastically easier than HTTP. The content-addressing also means you can basically sidesteps the whole act of “downloading”, no more need to download a file, extract a file, etc. You just access it directly in your file system by a unique name.
That said, I am also very pessimistic on it. IPFS suffer from “underspecification”. The protocol is completely focused on just moving bytes around. It doesn’t care about copyright or authorship, which becomes a huge problem due to content no longer having a real home in IPFS, everybody can pin, cache or share content on IPFS. It’s very much like Bittorrent in this regard, but worse as even Open Source licenses don’t help here. IPFS, unlike Bittorrent, doesn’t even guarantee that content will stay together, e.g. you can pin and reshare your favorite icon, without a hint of what license it is under or what icon theme you picked it from. For the time being everybody seems to just ignore the problem, but I think it will kill it if it gets popular before this problem is solved.
Another problem is that it’s just buggy and slow, especially when it comes to the fuse daemon that provides the /ipfs and /ipns directories. Though that at least is fixable on the client side. The copyright problem might not without some fundamental changes to the protocol itself.
Sounds like a feature, not a shortcoming
It means that using it properly is automatically illegal. I am not seeing how that’s a “feature”. It renders it completely unusable.
No it doesn’t. Maybe in some places? But not in most. You can break copyright laws with pen and paper, which don’t have any protection against it and are perfectly legal
I think that would go against the philosophy of ipfs. Sticking drm on top of it would crash with the intended self-archiving capabilities and censorship resistance, as well as with the whole point of a decentralized network since some entity or entities would have the power to block or delete content from it