First, let me say that I think that IPFS is a good idea and that it has applications that are useful now. However, if I interpret the parent's "thoughtless hype" as "hopelessly naive", I'm pretty much in agreement.
Checkout Freenet[0]. And while trying to maintain anonymity makes the problem even more difficult, there are fundamental problems in Freenet that make it basically unusable (mostly around cache coherency and latency). Freenet has been around since Ian Clarke's paper about distributed information storage and retrieval systems in 1999. They haven't managed to fix these fundamental problems in nearly 20 years of trying. I see absolutely no discussion of the same problems in IPFS (though abandoning anonymity is a good start).
It's one thing to say, "Hey distributed file system -- awesome". Then you can build all the easy bits and say, "Well, maybe cache coherency and latency won't be a big problem". But now look at what IPFS has to say about cache coherency on their wiki [1]. There is nothing at all that identifies or addresses the problems they will run into -- just a definition of the term and some links to random resources.
It's all well and good to say, "Eventual consistency", but what about guarantees of consistency? If I'm a vendor and I have a 1 day special offer, can I get a guarantee that caches will be consistent before my special offer is over? How do you deal with network partitions? Etc, etc, etc.
Before you start calling HTTP "obsolete", how about solving these kinds of problems? I have absolutely no problem with projects like these. They are awesome and I encourage the authors to keep working towards solving hard problems like the above. But announcing your solution before you've even realised that the problem is hard is pretty much the epitome of naivety.
First, it was not IPFS people who said HTTP was obsolete. If you check out the original post, it's from Neocities blog.
Second, people tried "sharing economy" startups back in the web1.0 era when everything went down crashing. But in 2017 we have Uber.
The freenet project doesn't change my argument at all because like I said, I'm not saying IPFS will succeed. I'm saying there's always a chance because the world is constantly changing. If you're lucky, you're at the right place at the right time building the right thing. If you're not, you fail.
In 1999 this wouldn't have worked of course, and that's my point. Successful projects succeed not just because of the product but also because of luck, timing, etc. There are so many new powerful technologies coming out nowadays, not to mention the societal change.
This is definitely a different world than what it was in 1999 and I'm saying just because it didn't work in 1999 doesn't mean it won't work in 2017.
One very important vector for adoption that often gets overlooked is interoperability. The cost of adoption can be significantly reduced by making sure the new thing nicely interoperates with the existing deployments. We're attempting to do this well with IPFS and libp2p.
Checkout Freenet[0]. And while trying to maintain anonymity makes the problem even more difficult, there are fundamental problems in Freenet that make it basically unusable (mostly around cache coherency and latency). Freenet has been around since Ian Clarke's paper about distributed information storage and retrieval systems in 1999. They haven't managed to fix these fundamental problems in nearly 20 years of trying. I see absolutely no discussion of the same problems in IPFS (though abandoning anonymity is a good start).
It's one thing to say, "Hey distributed file system -- awesome". Then you can build all the easy bits and say, "Well, maybe cache coherency and latency won't be a big problem". But now look at what IPFS has to say about cache coherency on their wiki [1]. There is nothing at all that identifies or addresses the problems they will run into -- just a definition of the term and some links to random resources.
It's all well and good to say, "Eventual consistency", but what about guarantees of consistency? If I'm a vendor and I have a 1 day special offer, can I get a guarantee that caches will be consistent before my special offer is over? How do you deal with network partitions? Etc, etc, etc.
Before you start calling HTTP "obsolete", how about solving these kinds of problems? I have absolutely no problem with projects like these. They are awesome and I encourage the authors to keep working towards solving hard problems like the above. But announcing your solution before you've even realised that the problem is hard is pretty much the epitome of naivety.
[0] - https://freenetproject.org/
[1] - https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1m...