Why IPFS Alone Isn't Enough for True Censorship Resistance

99% of IPFS requests go through centralized gateways (Cloudflare, Infura, Pinata). This reintroduces a single point of failure and censorship.\n- Centralized Takedowns: Gateways can block content at the HTTP layer.\n- Performance Bottleneck: Relies on a few corporate CDNs, not a peer-to-peer swarm.

Replace altruistic nodes with economic incentives for data availability and retrieval. This is the core innovation of Filecoin and Arweave.\n- Proof-of-Replication: Miners are paid to store and serve data.\n- Persistent Storage: Arweave's endowment model guarantees ~200 years of data permanence.

IPFS nodes garbage-collect unpinned data. If no one pays a pinning service, your "permanent" CID disappears. This is fatal for NFTs and decentralized apps.\n- Broken NFTs: Metadata and images vanish when startups shut down.\n- No Guarantees: The protocol provides persistence, not permanence.

Host your entire dApp frontend on IPFS+Filecoin/Arweave and serve it via ENS (Ethereum Name Service) or IPNS. This removes centralized web hosts from the stack.\n- Censorship-Resistant UI: No single entity can take down the application interface.\n- User-Owned Pathways: Resolve .eth names directly to decentralized content.

Finding the first peer with your data (DHT lookup) can take 10+ seconds. This kills user experience for web applications, which demand sub-second loads.\n- Cold Starts: Data is offline until a storing peer comes online.\n- No QoS: The network makes no speed guarantees.

Projects like Filecoin Saturn and Lighthouse create paid CDN layers for hot cache retrieval. Think The Graph but for arbitrary data.\n- Pay-for-Performance: Micro-payments for fast, reliable data delivery.\n- Hybrid Architecture: Combines economic permanence with web2 speed.

IPFS nodes have no incentive to store your data long-term. Pinning services like Pinata or Infura become de facto gatekeepers, creating a single point of failure and censorship.\n- Data disappears when the pin expires or the service is compromised.\n- Centralized control allows for takedown requests and selective service denial.

Arweave introduces a crypto-economic endowment to guarantee 200+ years of storage. Miners are paid upfront to store data forever, creating a sustainable, decentralized market.\n- Permanent storage is enforced by on-chain consensus.\n- Data redundancy is incentivized across a global network of miners.

Filecoin creates a decentralized storage market where clients pay for provable storage over time. Storage proofs (Proof-of-Replication, Proof-of-Spacetime) cryptographically verify data is stored.\n- Competitive pricing via a live marketplace.\n- Fault tolerance through automatic repair and deal renewal.

For rollups, the core problem is data availability, not long-term storage. Celestia uses Data Availability Sampling to allow light nodes to cryptographically verify that block data is published, without downloading it all.\n- Enables secure scaling for L2s like Arbitrum and Optimism.\n- Prevents data withholding attacks that could freeze rollups.

Most users rely on commercial pinning services like Pinata or Infura to keep data alive. This reintroduces a single point of failure and censorship.\n- Economic Censorship: A service can refuse to pin content or be legally compelled to remove it.\n- Data Mortality: If the pinning service fails, your 'permanent' data vanishes unless other nodes have it.

IPFS lacks a built-in, cryptoeconomic incentive layer for data persistence. Nodes have no reason to store your data long-term.\n- Free Rider Problem: Nodes cache popular content but discard obscure data, creating a long-tail censorship problem.\n- Contrast with Arweave: Unlike Arweave's permaweb model with endowment pools, IPFS persistence is voluntary and unreliable.

Finding data on IPFS requires knowing its exact CID. Discovery relies on centralized gateways, DHTs vulnerable to sybil attacks, or traditional web indexes.\n- Gateway Reliance: Most apps use public HTTP gateways, which can block requests.\n- DHT Limitations: The Distributed Hash Table can be poisoned or suffer from high latency (~10s) for lookups, breaking user experience.

True resistance requires combining IPFS with other decentralized primitives to attack each weakness.\n- Incentive Layer: Use Filecoin for paid, guaranteed storage or Arweave for permanent, endowment-backed persistence.\n- Discovery Layer: Pair with ENS for human-readable names and decentralized frontends served via IPFS or Skynet.

Overcome pinning centralization by programmatically ensuring data exists on many independent nodes.\n- P2P Protocols: Use Libp2p PubSub to broadcast and solicit pins from a permissionless swarm.\n- DAO-Based Pinning: Projects like Radicle use git-based replication; IPFS Clusters allow coordinated pinning across trusted groups.

Decentralize the access layer to prevent gateway-level blocking. This is critical for user onboarding.\n- Gateway Networks: Services like Cloudflare's IPFS Gateway are convenient but centralized. Emerging alternatives use decentralized CDNs.\n- Local Nodes: The endgame is lightweight browser-embedded nodes (e.g., Helia) or WASM clients that remove the gateway dependency entirely.

IPFS nodes don't store your data unless you pay a centralized pinning service like Pinata or Filecoin. This reintroduces a single point of failure and censorship.\n- Key Risk: A government can subpoena a major pinner to delete content.\n- Key Reality: Less than 1% of IPFS nodes pin data long-term.

True persistence requires economic incentives for decentralized storage. Filecoin uses a blockchain and proof-of-spacetime to pay for storage, while Arweave uses a one-time fee for permanent storage via its endowment model.\n- Key Benefit: Data survives independent of the original uploader.\n- Key Metric: ~20 EiB of raw storage secured across these networks.

Finding content on IPFS via the Distributed Hash Table (DHT) broadcasts your queries to random nodes. This leaks metadata about what you're looking for, enabling network-level surveillance.\n- Key Risk: Your IP address is linked to content requests.\n- Key Limitation: DHT offers zero privacy guarantees.

Protocols like Ethereum's Swarm and privacy-focused retrieval networks obscure the link between requester and content. Light clients can fetch data via anonymizing layers or direct payments to nodes without global broadcasts.\n- Key Benefit: Unlinkable content requests.\n- Key Architecture: Paid, targeted retrieval vs. public broadcasting.

IPFS guarantees a file's hash, not its continuous availability or that the correct file is served. A malicious node can serve different content for the same CID during retrieval, a form of liveness attack.\n- Key Risk: Users retrieve corrupted or spoofed data.\n- Key Flaw: CID alone doesn't prevent data withholding.

Networks like Celestia and EigenDA provide data availability proofs that data is published. Clients can verify these proofs without downloading the full dataset. For storage, Filecoin's Proof-of-Replication cryptographically proves unique storage.\n- Key Benefit: Trust-minimized verification of data existence and integrity.\n- Key Tech: Data Availability Sampling (DAS) for scalable light clients.