BCH + IPFS, they say... but then what?

7 408
Avatar for Devalbo
Written by
4 years ago

I'm a software developer and I have a problem. Folks keep talking about using blockchains for data, but there isn't a nice, simple solution to do this with BCH.

"Storing ALL data on the blockchain is bad", they say, "but it's OK to use a blockchain (e.g. BCH) as an anchor."

"Keep the data offchain", they say, "and IPFS (https://ipfs.io/) is a good way to do this."

And then the conversation stops and the crickets take over...

Unfortunately, this lack of data "utility" gets in the way of writing web applications, because if you're using a web browser, you expect to get/publish your data via HTTP. Right now (based on my impressions and limited research over the past two years), it seems like everything with IPFS is "roll your own" and HTTP/IPFS gateways are "out there".

Nowadays, the SPV infrastructure for BCH using HTTP is pretty good, so treating the blockchain as a graph of transactions is really working pretty well, even for small-ish chunks of data (ala https://bitcoinfiles.com/). So as a webapp developer, using browser clients with an embedded wallet or wallet plugin for user actions and intents is an intriguing way to do stuff. However, file and asset transfer (publishing/retrieving) is still not very well-served, which is where I come back to IPFS.

I'd like to do "the right thing" in BCH-land, which for this I am defining as anchoring data on BCH and storing on IPFS, but I'd like to guarantee that files I have uploaded via IPFS are always available over HTTP and I'd be willing to pay to do that instead of having to run my own server (just like I'm willing to pay AWS for S3 data storage). So this comes down to a list of questions:

  • Is there a service that lets me use BCH to host/pay for an IPFS node with an HTTP gateway without having to do much configuration? Storage/time costs seem perfectly reasonable for this.

  • If not, is there a good reason there isn't?

  • Is this something other folks are asking themselves, too, which means there might be some opportunity?

1
$ 6.21
$ 5.00 from @Ellie
$ 0.50 from @Read.Cash
$ 0.50 from @unitedstatian
+ 3
Avatar for Devalbo
Written by
4 years ago

Comments

Great questions. Though I don't know the answers for these.

$ 0.00
User's avatar Read.Cash
4 years ago

"Storing ALL data on the blockchain is bad", they say

Why? I think there are ways bitcoin can adjust to this.

$ 0.00
User's avatar dave
4 years ago

Signed up just to leave this comment, particularly since I work for Dash and have seen increased solutions-oriented collaboration between our communities in recent months. This is a problem Dash is attempting to solve by implementing IPFS on masternodes and making data available over a decentralized API, for which the masternodes also serve as endpoints. While not fit for storing large binary files, it works well (and is designed for) storing transaction metadata and data about customer relationships to make it easy to e.g. set up regular payments or pay friends. The service is incentivized through the usual transaction fees and the mined block reward. For BCH, a similar approach may be possible using full nodes, although the lack of a requirement for collateral may cause problems with Sybil attacks.

$ 0.15
User's avatar strophy
4 years ago

There are some paid pinning providers listed at https://awesome.ipfs.io/services/ , but not sure if any of those accept Bitcoin Cash...

$ 0.10
User's avatar btcfork
This user is who they claim to be.
We have manually verified this user via some other channel.
4 years ago

It was interesting for me to discover that IPFS doesn't really replicate data on its own. Basically your node is the one that keeps the data most of the time, occasionally other nodes would try to cache it. It doesn't really make sense for me, because it doesn't really make it "distributed"... maybe I'm misunderstanding something...

$ 0.00
User's avatar Read.Cash
4 years ago

At this point IPFS is a basically "torrent 2.0": People downloading your stuff will also be able to serve them, people can find you without DNS as a point of failure, and as an improvement from Torrent, peers can serve the same files across different swarms... etc.

It doesn't replicate data on its own because, well, nobody has incentive to. Filecoin is supposedly trying to grab that holy grail (they just released testnet). Keep an eye out.

$ 0.05
User's avatar im_uname
4 years ago

IPFS person here šŸ‘‹ - as mentioned there are a growing number of ā€œipfs pinning as a serviceā€ providers that are filling this niche in various ecosystems - but Iā€™m not sure if thereā€™s one that accepts pinning requests via BCH in particular. Infura, piƱata, temporal, eternum, and others are all good groups to give this feature request - or look at the tools infura has built to do this for ethereum and use it to build your own!!

Another option (which is more ā€œcommonsā€ oriented is to use the newly launched collaborative clusters - which allow multiple independent ipfs nodes to peer to store the same collective dataset on ipfs (which can be maintained by one or multiple admin nodes). Check that one out at cluster.ipfs.io.

$ 0.00
User's avatar Momack2
4 years ago
About us Rules What is Bitcoin Cash? Affiliate program Get sponsored Self-host hello@read.cash