BitSwap ledgers are open to manipulation about ipfs HOT 5 CLOSED

Yep! Individual ledgers are described in IPFS today are not meant to be transferred at all, or be secure accounts of value exchanged. This is why no ledgers are exchanged, you only generate them locally, and they're meant for rough estimates of mutually profitable peering agreements. (as you said, you can trust yourself)

Think of BitSwap for now as generalized BitTorrent. Sybills that extract a little bit of traffic are similar to legitimate new users or leeching users. (i.e. want to avoid supporting them, but need a way to still provide good service to new users). As hinted at in the paper (mention of currencies), the plan is to support complex bitswap strategies, including cryptocurrency exchanges for data, and more secure ledgers (potentially using distributed consensus systems). Note that BitSwap nodes are free to set their own strategy, whatever that may be. The one offered is simply a good base. It needs lots of work though, I'd like to have something as optimal as PropShare.

I do not want to require any distributed consensus for BitSwap ledgers, because a critical point of IPFS is to be able to work in entirely p2p environments, including nodes that are temporarily (or permanently) disconnected from the majority of the internet. BitSwap sets up simple rules for exchange of data, upon which you can layer more sophisticated trade strategies, like the use of currencies.

In general, BitSwap is the part of IPFS that could be improved the most. There's lots of room in the design space. :)

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Oh and, safer NodeID generation is potentially a good way to handle lots of this. S/Kad PoW isn't really sybil-safe (just heightens the bar). Other DHTs have proposed the use of social nets (Whanau, etc). Stake based currencies are also interesting.

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Has this been changed since you wrote the IPFS paper then, or am I just misunderstanding? From the paper: "When activating a connection, BitSwap nodes exchange their ledger information."

Thanks for clearing this up. :)

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Oh, they exchange it to verify they match (this could just be sending a
hash to each other, there was another reason before but that was removed a
long time ago)

On Mon, Aug 25, 2014 at 3:08 PM, Matt Bell [email protected] wrote:

Has this been changed since you wrote the IPFS paper then, or am I just
misunderstanding? From the paper: "When activating a connection, BitSwap
nodes exchange their ledger information."

Thanks for clearing this up. :)

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Ah, then I interpreted that incorrectly. Thanks :)

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