Interesting project addressing linkrot and central servers. Hopefully this line of work will attract more attention and developers.<p>Sadly the design contains some flaws that need addressing.
From their whitepaper (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.benet.ai&#x2F;t&#x2F;ipfs.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.benet.ai&#x2F;t&#x2F;ipfs.pdf</a>)
The architecture is essentially creating 1 giant Bittorrent swarm where each piece may be seeded by different people. See section 3.4.4 of whitepaper. This approach suffers from the &quot;double coincidence of wants&quot; problem. There will be a billion items if this takes off. Matches are rare and could take hours&#x2F;days.<p>&quot;Aside from BitSwap, which is a novel protocol&quot;.
These types of protocols have been worked on for over 8 years. Nobody has ever been able to protect them from an Eclipse or Sybil attack. Early work:
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seas.upenn.edu&#x2F;~cse400&#x2F;CSE400_2005_2006&#x2F;Wang&#x2F;Writeup.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seas.upenn.edu&#x2F;~cse400&#x2F;CSE400_2005_2006&#x2F;Wang&#x2F;Writ...</a>
Deployed system from my research group, improved upon for 7 years now: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pds.twi.tudelft.nl&#x2F;~pouwelse&#x2F;A_network_science_perspective_of_a_distributed_reputation_mechanism.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pds.twi.tudelft.nl&#x2F;~pouwelse&#x2F;A_network_science_pe...</a>