[bisq-network/bisq] Using IPFS in bisq (#2845)

reipichu notifications at github.com
Fri May 24 11:55:29 UTC 2019


I would like to add a few words of caution about relying too heavily on IPFS for hosting files that are critical to the Bisq project and the DAO, particularly concerning the assumption that it would be a solution to future censorship:

* IPFS does not guarantee durability[1]. It requires "pinning" of data on nodes for the data to be consistently available, which would mean hosting our own IPFS nodes to ensure the data is pinned, or paying a pinning service to make the data available continually. 
* IPFS is not built to be censorship resistant[2]. There is already a DMCA blacklist[3][4] which IPFS nodes can optionally subscribe to, to prevent them from serving or relaying copyrighted content that has been served DMCA takedown requests. The fact that this functionality is already built in to the network means that there is no guarantee that any other type of data might not be censored in future (such as crypto-related services) if a hostile government were to crack down on services hosting such data.
* IPFS is not designed to preserve anonymity[5]. Anonymity is very closely related to censorship resistance, since without it a censor can target the identified users who are requesting the censored materials. Even if you publish data to IPFS through an anonymizing network transport (Tor), the users requesting the data still need to know to protect their own anonymity in order to protect against a censoring government[6].

I am not opposed to the idea of using IPFS as a backup in case the centralized services we use decide to censor the project, but it would be best as a mirror rather than a primary copy, in my opinion. We should also work on the conservative assumption that if our centralized services (GitHub, DNS registrar, web hosts etc.) decide to censor the Bisq project, that censorship on IPFS will be the next risk to address.

[1] https://docs.ipfs.io/guides/concepts/pinning/
[2] https://github.com/ipfs/faq/issues/36#issuecomment-140567411
[3] https://github.com/ipfs/community/blob/master/code-of-conduct.md#copyright-violations
[4] https://github.com/ipfs/refs-denylists-dmca
[5] https://github.com/ipfs/faq/issues/18#issuecomment-96303862
[6] https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/281#issuecomment-370594779


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