I've been looking for this service for a long time. I liked the way it works and the simple interface.

What happens if my balance is exhausted? Do you notify me or my files are just gone?

We notify you when your balance drops below $1, which should be enough time to top-up again. In the future we're thinking of having that notify N days before we estimate your balance going to 0.

By the way, the site uses trackingco.de for analytics, so I can give you some free balance to return the favor :)

Good to know about that, because I tried to top up $1 earlier, the browser didn't allow me, then I edited the DOM manually and succeeded in getting a Stripe payment modal -- however it seems that the notification system wasn't ready for misers like me.

Thank you for the free balance, that was very kind!

Haha, the $2 minimum was too much, huh? :P

This service is for pinning files on IPFS. Say, for example, that someone wants to publish a paper that they want to always be available (even if a government tries to take it down). IPFS helps by making distribution p2p, as anyone who accesses the file can also redistribute it until it expires from their cache.

Pinning removes this expiration, and serves the file forever. Eternum provides that service, making sure the file will always be on at least one node, and thus always accessible.

It's not really comparable to Dropbox or S3 at all.

Our marketing currently assumes you're familiar with IPFS, as I don't think the service will be too useful directly if you aren't. Maybe we should change that, though.

Another avenue for this is, for example, what IPFessay (http://ipfessay.stavros.io) does: it publishes a file on IPFS and then invites you to click a link to Eternum to pin it, even without knowing how IPFS or Eternum work.

you will still take it down with a DMCA request though.

From our server. We can't do anything about taking it down from the network.

If nobody else has a copy of the paper on the network?

If a file is so obscure that nobody has ever wanted to read it, and it was only on one node, and that node also stops serving it, then it leaves the network until someone puts it back in.

Well, then the pinning service is a bit useless, isn't it?

If it's popular it should not need pinning, if it's not popular it needs pinning but can be easily censored...

I don't understand. If you want to keep child porn available, I'm afraid you'll have to find another service. If you're writing subversive propaganda against the Erdogan regime, we're happy to keep that pinned.

This isn't about Childporn, it's about papers.

You claim to pin stuff on IPFS, however you also say you comply to DMCA.

Unless you want legal trouble, this means you'll have to comply with any DMCA request that might be remotely valid.

Search up "Alex Mauer" to get a recent example of how DMCA can and will be misused.

Unless you want to get in trouble with big publishers, you will have to censor users on your service, it is essentially useless for niche files that cause legal trouble, regardless of how that is resolved.

How is your pinning service useful to keep such files online? How do you plan to defend yourself against the Erdogan or Chinese Regime?

I'm not sure what your argument is. Do you want to post pirated files, or files for which someone else has the copyright? Why do Erdogan or the Chinese Regime want to use the DMCA against you?

Why would they not use DMCA? It has been used for not-really-copyright-issue before.

Again, look up what Alex Mauer is doing with DMCAs.

From my understanding it's more like web hosting with IPFS than file storage with Dropbox. You could put up an HTML web page and instead of running your own IPFS node in order to let people access your site, they run it for you.

Well, your argument could be pointed against Amazon S3, because they charge while Google, Dropbox and Microsoft offer storage for free.

This is IPFS, the use case is different.