Status of Swarm vs IPFS

Question

I have been studying ipfs for a few days.. still a newbie.. its a amazing protocol. So is Swarm. Correct me, if I am wrong, but right now ipfs cant be used for long term storage or even as a backup. There are workarounds and external providers (eternum, sia), but the alternate options using centralized storage is much cheaper and reliable. Filecoin is supposed to be the incentivizing layer, but its not publicly developed and searching for its status didnt return anything.

I also learnt that they maybe releasing it to accredited investors only. (Reddit post on: Why is filecoin being released only to accredited investors?)

I am curious to know about the status of swarm?

Is there a document which provides the current capabilities (semi-technical) of swarm? is the incentivization protocols mentioned here: https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/a/10113/14143, implemented yet?

Answer 1

Swarm is in alpha release.

The incentivization layer is not yet implemented. Other parts of swarm however are already implemented.

This means: * You can use swarm already to upload and retrieve files

• Files/Content are chunked up and distributed by content address to the network the way the protocol is meant to work, and content can be retrieved by hash

• You can upload files and directories (also recursively), retrievals can return manifests outlining the content, and you can update content of manifests (resulting in new hashes)

• As the incentivization/insurance is not yet implemented, this means that files uploaded may get deleted/purged from the network after some time. Most popular content is likely to remain available, but not so popular content could be expunged from node's storage if they reach capacity and they receive more popular content

• It is alpha, use at own risk

• Current implementation is a bit slow, next updates should fix that