Can anyone explain how an “NFT domain” compares to Namecoin?
I’m very interested in decentralised and censorship resistant hosting but it really feels like very little progress has been made here. It still seems like the best setup is a tor hidden service. It’s not decentralised but it’s a whole lot more practical and private from what I can see.
I assume IPFS is using some kind of torrent like DHT where it’s trivial to see what files people are accessing.
From my perspective, completely decentralised hosting is not actually very important. A website typically has a central owner who adds content and maintains it, they can often also host some software on a computer somewhere. The hard part is the transport between the owner and the user.
As we have seen, networking infrastructure is widely weaponised for censorship. Tor services avoid this but the accessibility massively drops so you won’t have much of a user base if you rely on tor.
There are max. 2 millions TOR users, but everybody can access the website hosted on IPFS (7 billions). TOR is sensitive to DDoS attack, IPFS; it is not. Ipfs is permanent web.
BTW. Onion sites are not private. Law enforcement can access the onion sites in the same way as others. It just appears private. A cop in undercover can appear like an ordinary citizen and purchase dope from a dealer.
> There are max. 2 millions TOR users, everybody can access the website hosted on IPFS (7 billion)
Only via a centralized relay, giving up the other nice properties.
> TOR is sensitive to DDoS attack, IPFS; it is not.
To DDoS a ToR website you'd need to overload the server(s) the website owner set up. To DDoS IPFS you'd need to overload the whole network. Harder, but not impossible. See [1].
> Ipfs is permanent web.
Sort of, but you have to address pinning.
> Law enforcement can access the onion sites in the same way as others ... A cop in undercover can appear like an ordinary citizen and purchase dope from a dealer
Yes. Solving this would require implementing an evil bit[2]. I don't think IPFS has solved that problem?
What does max 2 million tor users mean? Anyone can install the Tor browser or view it through Brave browser. I assume you mean the existence of IPFS http gateways? Well there is nothing preventing a tor gateway from exisiting in exactly the same way. I assume the only reason it’s not common is the gateways would receive too many abuse reports due to the content typically hosted on onion sites. This has nothing to do with tech though.
DDoS resistance is an issue on Tor but it has been shown that you can mitigate it. That’s one thing IPFS should win by default.
And for privacy, Tor is pretty much the best you can get. It’s not bullet proof but it is the safest tech in existence. For DHT based technologies you can literally query the DHT and get the ip address of every single person who has a copy of the files. This is way way less private than tor, it’s less private than a standard clearnet website.
I am not advocating for IPFS gateways. Gateways are centralized, I already mentioned somewhere.
You can access the website directly via its CID (ipfs://CID), or via its decentralized domain (domain.eth, domain.x). But of course, you will need a browser with native support for IPFS (Opera, Brave). Currently for other browsers you need an extension called ipfs companion.
I believe the DMCA and the WIPO Copyright Treaty for the rest of the world is what lets specific kinds of math (in a different field) be banned. DeCSS tested this back in '99, with legislation that prohibited publication. Civil disobedience to protest/circumvent this ruling were rife, including the discovery of an illegal number.
It is hosting company that is operated from U.S. jurisdiction under sauce of Decentralized Storage, and it is laughable in context that presumably it can not be shut down by Law enforcement.
> Everything you upload is public and it is online forever!
It is 'forever' only until people operating these services interested in making money, it is gone after that.
Let's say you upload files via a Pinning Service (Filebase or Pinata).
Let's say this website has some traffic.
Now let's say this pinning service removes your website, or the pinning service ban your website, or the pinnging service gets bankrupt.
This happens:
If someone requests a file or a webpage, a copy of the file is cached on their node. As more and more people request that data, more and more cached copies will exist. Subsequent requests for that file can be fulfilled by any node —or combination of nodes—that has the file on it. The burden of delivering the data and fulfilling the
request is gradually shared out among many nodes.
Wouldn't the pinning service be the thing keeping the site on ipfs and thus the place that someone could take you offline?
Also, I'm pretty sure most ipfs gateways that expose ipfs to http requests do comply with DMCA and other takedown notices. The content might be in the ipfs, but it won't be accessible on every gateway (which might break your url)
I’m very interested in decentralised and censorship resistant hosting but it really feels like very little progress has been made here. It still seems like the best setup is a tor hidden service. It’s not decentralised but it’s a whole lot more practical and private from what I can see.
I assume IPFS is using some kind of torrent like DHT where it’s trivial to see what files people are accessing.
From my perspective, completely decentralised hosting is not actually very important. A website typically has a central owner who adds content and maintains it, they can often also host some software on a computer somewhere. The hard part is the transport between the owner and the user.
As we have seen, networking infrastructure is widely weaponised for censorship. Tor services avoid this but the accessibility massively drops so you won’t have much of a user base if you rely on tor.