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pervycreeper | 7 years ago

Could you explain why you think that Cloudflare's recent effort constitutes an attack on IPFS? That is, wouldn't the pinning of a large number of files, hosted on a fast CDN, be a good thing?

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leolambda|7 years ago

Cloudflare's business model is intrinsically threatened by the existence of a global, distributed, and (basically) commons-supported CDN, because that would make their point-served, centralized, relatively expensive CDN obsolete.

jazzyjackson|7 years ago

Agreed, and yet, isn't the point of the decentralized web that it will still be there when Cloudflare decides to drop the service?

kentonv|7 years ago

No, not really. IPFS is a storage platform. Cloudflare is fundamentally a compute platform (servers in hundreds of cities to which you can deploy arbitrary code and trust that it is executed faithfully). These two things are complementary, not competitive, which is why we decided it would be interesting to integrate with IPFS.

(Disclosure: I work for Cloudflare.)

pshc|7 years ago

I think Cloudflare could easily co-exist, selling premium IPFS hosting for companies who want highly available and performant content. Not to mention they do much more than static CDN.

pervycreeper|7 years ago

You're implying that there's some ulterior-motive Embrace, Extend, Extinguish plan underlying this? Is there anything, however, in what they announced they will do that will have a negative effect, though?