If everything goes according to plan for SpaceX, SpaceX will start permanent bases on moon and mars in the next decade. One challenge for moon and mars bases will be that a good chunk of the software we have on earth stops working when there’s no internet connection.
Package managers, whether they are Ubuntu’s Snap or programming tools like npm download their packages from the internet and fail when there are minutes of delay for traffic between earth and mars. The same goes for App stores and operating system updates.
If those services would use IPFS instead of TCP/IP they would still work on mars if there’s an IPFS bridge between earth and mask that transfers IPFS packages that are requested on mars but currently unavailable from earth to mars.
While it’s possible to write custom software for Mars that works without TCP/IP it would benefit a Mars base a lot when as much of normal software as possible that can use IPFS to transfer data uses IPFS.
One reason why IPFS currently isn’t used more is that every node that normally requests data from the IPFS network has to broadcast it’s IP address openly together with the data it wants to access. In that configuration an attacker can gather knowledge about which software is run within a company network which is undesirable.
From the privacy perspective it would be advantageous if a user only has to reveal to his ISP which package they want to access via IPFS. If the user only would have to reveal to his ISP the content they want to access they would have better privacy then they currently have with TCP/IP.
This setup would be advantageous for the ISP as well because content that’s downloaded by many users doesn’t have to be requested multiple times from its original source which saves both the ISP and the original data source bandwidth costs.
Legacy ISPs profit a bit from this setup by being able to bill Netflix, Youtube and Amazon prime for hosting servers on their premises to do a similar job, but this predatory setup is bad for the open internet. It means that only companies that can afford servers at every ISP can get comparable performance for their video service while if this job would be done by the ISP, the ISP would pay for the servers on their network.
IPFS to TCP/IP being superior for a lot of content is a reason for SpaceX to provide IPFS proxies to their Starlink customers. Providing IPFS proxies will be an additional selling point to distinguish SpaceX from legacy ISPs. Overall the ability to incentivize software companies to save bandwidth by using IPFS for transferring data in a way that also works on Mars is more important to SpaceX’s overall goals.
SpaceX should provide IPFS proxies with Starlink
If everything goes according to plan for SpaceX, SpaceX will start permanent bases on moon and mars in the next decade. One challenge for moon and mars bases will be that a good chunk of the software we have on earth stops working when there’s no internet connection.
Package managers, whether they are Ubuntu’s Snap or programming tools like npm download their packages from the internet and fail when there are minutes of delay for traffic between earth and mars. The same goes for App stores and operating system updates.
If those services would use IPFS instead of TCP/IP they would still work on mars if there’s an IPFS bridge between earth and mask that transfers IPFS packages that are requested on mars but currently unavailable from earth to mars.
While it’s possible to write custom software for Mars that works without TCP/IP it would benefit a Mars base a lot when as much of normal software as possible that can use IPFS to transfer data uses IPFS.
One reason why IPFS currently isn’t used more is that every node that normally requests data from the IPFS network has to broadcast it’s IP address openly together with the data it wants to access. In that configuration an attacker can gather knowledge about which software is run within a company network which is undesirable.
From the privacy perspective it would be advantageous if a user only has to reveal to his ISP which package they want to access via IPFS. If the user only would have to reveal to his ISP the content they want to access they would have better privacy then they currently have with TCP/IP.
This setup would be advantageous for the ISP as well because content that’s downloaded by many users doesn’t have to be requested multiple times from its original source which saves both the ISP and the original data source bandwidth costs.
Legacy ISPs profit a bit from this setup by being able to bill Netflix, Youtube and Amazon prime for hosting servers on their premises to do a similar job, but this predatory setup is bad for the open internet. It means that only companies that can afford servers at every ISP can get comparable performance for their video service while if this job would be done by the ISP, the ISP would pay for the servers on their network.
IPFS to TCP/IP being superior for a lot of content is a reason for SpaceX to provide IPFS proxies to their Starlink customers. Providing IPFS proxies will be an additional selling point to distinguish SpaceX from legacy ISPs. Overall the ability to incentivize software companies to save bandwidth by using IPFS for transferring data in a way that also works on Mars is more important to SpaceX’s overall goals.