Re: The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS)

From: S Moonesamy <sm+mu_at_elandsys.com>
Date: Sun, 08 Oct 2017 14:34:14 -0700


Hi Rishikesh,
At 06:01 AM 08-10-2017, RISHIKESH BHOLAH wrote:
>Recently Ish, Chittesh and I were discussing about Mozilla's goal of
>decentralizing the internet. Yesterday, I found out about the
>InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) [1] which is supposedly the best
>upgrade for our long old HTTP. Despite of having no notion of the
>IPFS during our conversation, the IPFS reflected closely to what we
>were thinking.

Thank you for providing some references as it saved me the time to
see what you were asking about.

>The IPFS is a distributed file system that seeks to connect all
>computing devices with the same system of files. [2] The following
>article [3] highlights the bottlenecks of HTTP as it being old,
>impermanent, centralized and that content is IP addressed. Hence,
>the IPFS aims to complement or even replace HTTP by making a
>permanent web where links are content addressed and not IP
>addressed. Therefore reducing latency as the content is grabbed from
>its nearest location.

A distributed file system is not the same as a protocol. Some of the
webpages you mentioned tend to mix the two. There are basically two
things, identifier and locator.

>IPFS uses a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) to store data, a MerkleDAG
>to give it structure (inspired by the GIT protocol) and a bittorrent
>like data exchange mechanism to maximize bandwidth. [4]

The DHT sounds a bit like bittorrent.

>I would like to know what you (and others) think about this new
>protocol and if one day the IPFS could replace HTTP.

If you are interested in interplanetary stuff, I suggest reading
about Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) [1]. As I am not involved in
the work being done in that area, I cannot give you anything which
is close to a good answer. I doubt that HTTP will be replaced any
time in the near future.

Regards,
S. Moonesamy

1. https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/dtn/
Received on Sun Oct 08 2017 - 21:34:54 PST

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