I've been using this for a couple weeks. Along with Zcash, it is the most amazing crypto-engineering project I've seen in years.
Imagine being able to share files on an ad hoc basis with anyone -- on any network. Share with someone based on Twitter, on Facebook, or email address.
Even better, all with cryptographic proofs of identity, strong crypto at every level, and open source.
Came here to say pretty much the same thing. It's slick and easy to use. It's actually the 'dropbox' I've always wanted and if they introduce a storage limit I'd pay.
What's also impressive is doing away with Dropbox's clunky "selective sync". While having everything stored locally sounds like a good idea at first, as you store more and more data is gets less and less user-friendly; in other words, power-users get the worst user experience.
Additionally, creating an easy way to share files with friends without taking up their quota is awesome. This looks like it could be a very, very powerful competitor to Dropbox.
Not storing files locally sounds like a good idea at first - you don't have any syncing issues. But nobody has a perfect always-on internet connection. Having files local is worth the occasional sync cockup.
Oh for sure there's a reason that approach is dropbox's default - its really hard for people to understand their files aren't really "there".
That said, my point is more that for people who start storing 100GB+ of data, it becomes harder and harder to actually manage which bits you want at any time.
>There is no paid upgrade currently. The 10GB free accounts will stay free, but we'll likely offer paid storage for people who want to store more data.
Dropbox works with the NSA to hand over customer data. You are absolutely right that something like this would go over like a turd in a punchbowl at Dropbox HQ.
Unlike Google, Microsoft and Slack, Dropbox does have the top, 5 star, EFF rating for protecting your data from the government... I'm not sure what more they could be doing.
Their profitability depends on being able to dedupe and compress data across all customers. They would need to raise prices significantly to make client side encryption a built in feature.
Then use tarsnap already. Bonus: it is owned by our own cperciva.
tarsnap is nerdish, secure and reasonably priced for what it provides IIRC. Haven't used it though but expect someone would have yelled out here if it was bad. (In fact the only one I've seen bashing it was patio11, -because it was too cheap and too nerdish.)
I don't think it's distributed in the IPFS fashion, right?
Which makes sense, of course, since Keybase is a funded startup that needs to capture value... and, well, centralized file sharing is a more straightforward solution, too.
The file system thing seems really cool and useful. I'm a fan of Keybase and will recommend this to people with whom I need to share sensitive data.
It'd be interesting to hear the Keybase people talk openly about how they see their role as both infrastructure providers for an open web of trust, and an economic entity that requires for its survival some degree of lock-in and centralization.
IPFS alone is usable for the public web, but is not usable for private sharing. You need a social identity-oriented public key infrastructure with a good UI. That is Keybase, and it's incredible that we have this now. Sure, we should implement an IPFS backend for the storage part. But let's not neglect the huge progress the Keybase folks have given us.
Well, what I'm hoping for from Keybase is enough user friendly tooling to encourage a lot of people to start using public-key cryptography. I don't see IPFS as really addressing any of that, even though it is extremely cool and valuable in other ways.
I love the ideas behind IPFS, but it isn't even trying to solve the same problems as KeyBase, so comparing them like this is very silly. Users may be able to benefit from both in different ways, or even use parts of the two together in the future.
I'm not speaking for Keybase, but their approach so far is to fill these roles in compatible ways.
As an infrastructure provider, they open source the client software and design it to trust the server as little as possible. They also endeavor to document the behavior of the server so that, in theory, you could build your own Keybase-compatible server.
As an economic entity, they're positioned to tackle the issues that open source projects usually face, like support, development resources, UI design resources, and "where do you put all of this encrypted data" by getting their most needy users (mostly businesses) to pay them.
The second part is usually handled by encrypting a randomly chosen symmetric cipher key using each public key, and then encrypting the file with a symmetric cipher. And I believe keybase was founded to tackle the first problem.
Zcash is an actually anonymous cryptocurrency (BitCoin is not, since senders and receivers are public). The crypto is definitely impressive (which it is, it uses zero knowledge proofs -- which are really cool math -- for a lot of its sending operations).
I managed to find the prerelease packages in the build scripts, and got it working through that. Make sure you restart the keybase service, as it doesn't happen automatically
Imagine being able to share files on an ad hoc basis with anyone -- on any network. Share with someone based on Twitter, on Facebook, or email address.
Even better, all with cryptographic proofs of identity, strong crypto at every level, and open source.