Few quick questions. How easy is it to set up an ipfs node and will you include a tutorial on how to set one up?
It's pretty simple, IPFS already provides an indepth tutorial for this:
https://ipfs.io/docs/getting-started/Their tutorial works fine on both OSX, Linux and Windows from my testing.
Pure_Vidz, thanks for explanation. I didn't realize ipfs was based on hosting your own files instead of offloading them onto the network. I see the resemblance to torrents instead of decentralized dropbox links. I love the incentive structure based on bounties. I hope the test goes well, and eventually I can use links hosted by unknowing others instead of me just due to the fact of the encryption and distribution of fragments of files making the use of vpn not necessary and doesn't require running a host for prolonged periods of time after initial upload for a low effort contributor. Exciting times.
It's very much like Torrenting and infact it's built on similar technology. People can actively choose what content they continue to seed by "pinning" a file hash, otherwise for example a simple test is seed an image or video or something onto the IPFS network for about 24h, then drop your node. The file will still be accessible for quite some. To my understanding, if nobody has the file pinned the file which in Torrenting terms think of this as explicitly choosing to seed the file rather than being a leecher it's possible for a file to die. By default, when you upload content to the network yourself that content is pinned to your node thus even if other nodes don't have your content pinned and it became inactive and purged during garbage collection the other nodes will be able to pick up your file again because there's at least one node with the content pinned (you).
When you upload a file to the network and get its IPFS file hash, it's pretty much instantly accessible from gateway nodes other than your own and you can verify this by checking if you can access the file on the default gateway which is gateway.ipfs.io and content that is constantly being requested won't bombard solely you because other nodes pick up file due to recent activity.