So the obvious question, after reading that page, is... how do we ensure that if the data identified by X is there now, that data will still be there tomorrow? What incentive is there to host other people's data?
Great question. IPFS doesn't make any guarantees regarding durability, because ultimately this depends on people caring about the file, either because it's valuable to them, or they're deriving indirect value (being paid to care).
People that care about the data's presence will pin objects locally:
- I pin + seed my own files, or files I'm interested in keeping alive.
- I can hire a service (or multiple) to pin + seed my files for me.
- I can use things like http://filecoin.io to incentivize large groups of people to seed files for me. (this is why Filecoin + IPFS are sister protocols)
Is seeding strictly necessary?
Borrowing from Diaspora, can't it be pods (now acting as data routers) that each node first connects to for establishing a peer-to-peer connection? Note, that this is just during the connection establishment phase (assuming TCP or higher level SPDY/QUIC), i.e the control plane and during the actual data transfer, the data can flow directly to the peer via a potentially secured connection (like a VPN?)
Of course, that would introduce some privileged nodes, but if anyone can create such a node, as part of protocol and be part of this data routing network, isn't that still a distributed egalitarian network?
