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0 pointsjillesvangurp5y ago0 comments

Somebody still needs to agree to hosting your data. Incentivizing peers to host your encrypted data is not a solved problem. IPFS is trying to bootstrap some cryptocurrency to fix that but they seems to be taking their sweet time with that.

So, ultimately, you always end up with somebody providing the convenience of not throwing your data away for a fee. Github and Gitlab seem to be the popular options for that. Gitlab is actually open source and you can self host it if you want and many do. But the reason they have a nice valuation is that they have lots of customers that prefer them to do it.

Given that it's MIT Licensed, you can even do that and offer it as a service probably (Amazon, there's a nice idea for you :-) ).

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diggan5y ago

> IPFS is trying to bootstrap some cryptocurrency to fix that but they seems to be taking their sweet time with that

AFAIK, Filecoin is live now, and seems you can use it now for getting peers to host your IPFS data.

But, I'm also unsure that incentivizing peers with actual money is the best and/or only solution. BitTorrent works today for free, many peers are seeding content just to be seeders. DC++ worked yesterday, where people shared data just to share data.

While probably offering money for storing data will get more people onboard to store others data, it doesn't seem to be the only solution we have at hand to get free sharing of data.

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