Following up on a debate which came up on twitter about the tradeoffs between using the IC for distributed data storage vs something like Arweave/IPFS. I think this is an interesting topic so I wanted to share some more of my thoughts around it. A basic question raised by @lastmjs was, why would you…

Very good points. I agree on point 2. I would lend much less weight to point 1 though, since improvements are relatively imminent. Canisters will scale up to possibly 300gb (possibly more in the future), and any simple storage solution would abstract away the multi-canister complexities, offering a …

Nice post. On point 2; for data that needs to be stored securely and is to be accessed very infrequently(i.e. AWS S3 Glacier), I think Swarm provides the best decentralized storage solution.

I’ll add that if you need your data to be accessible via contextual computation then you may want to consider the IC as well…the other platforms can’t do that. ie: files that can he due to social, financial, or other data context. Maybe other platforms can do some simple gating of content, but they…

Agreed. Maybe a third point or just a better overall point for 1 is that as of today, some of the tooling is just further along for some of these other technologies. For example you can stream data directly from S3 to IPFS. This sort of thing can, should, and likely will be done on the IC too, as yo…

I also remember to read somewhere that there are plans for different subnet-types like a subnet-type optimized for storage, so storage on canisters on those subnets will be cheaper.

Let me make sure I understand this. Basically what you’re saying is that I can store a single copy of some (potentially sensitive) data on the IC and then make that single copy available to different end users with different levels of access. I can limit the fields they are allowed to view, serve an…

Correct…or, if it is media, you can manipulate the media.

Yes. Although you’ll probably be using Rust for all that.

Yes. Although you’ll probably be using Rust for all that. Interesting. Why do you say that?

That is very, very cool. Would probably be useful if I collect a list of advantages of using the IC for data storage and add those to the original post as well. I’ll work on that.

The IC vs Arweave/IPFS for Distributed Data Storage

Developers

lastmjs November 4, 2022, 11:15pm 20

Boundary node providers yes, not the node providers running canisters and controlled by the NNS, is my understanding.

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The IC vs Arweave/IPFS for Distributed Data Storage

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