Re: [GSoC 23] distributed substitutes, cost of storage

[Attila Lendvai]

> Haven't read the Swarm thing, going more off of the general vibe of
> these cryptocurrency related projects that keep popping up:
> Using some kind of (optional) web of trust for clients makes more sense
> to me than making people pay with cryptocurrencies.
> 
> I should be able to set up two computers on a LAN in the middle of
> nowhere without having to care about some blockchain's global
> consistency.


yes, but those are different tasks, solved by different tools.

Swarm (and IPFS, and their ilk) solve large-scale cooperation in storing 
content. and the larger the scale of cooperation, the larger the benefits 
(redundance, fault tolerance, speed due to automatic caching, etc).


> NDN can do this right and has been able to for a while.
> Personally, I would try that and other established non-ponzi
> technologies first for distributed substitutes.
> Not being "permissionless" should not be considered a must have.


no, it's not a must have. it's just one more storage backend for storing 
substitutes -- once an abstraction layer like ERIS is installed.

without using ERIS, i wouldn't advocate for adding Swarm as the sole p2p 
backend integrated into Guix. there are better candidates for such a 
hypothetical singular position, or even as the first backend to get integrated.

-- 
• attila lendvai
• PGP: 963F 5D5F 45C7 DFCD 0A39
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