IPFS Design with David Dias

The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is a decentralized global, peer-to-peer file system. IPFS combines ideas from BitTorrent, Git, and Bitcoin, creating a new way to store and access objects across the Internet.

When you access an object on almost any website, you are accessing the object via a location address—a URL. The URL tells you where to find the object. If the object is a photo on Facebook that you are linking to, the URL will have an address somewhere on Facebook. Other objects that we access through URLs include web pages, videos, and JavaScript import packages.

URLs seem natural to us. You look up an object based on where that object is being stored. Why would you do anything differently?

A downside of location addressing is that if the location disappears, you can no longer access that object. If a government decides to censor a website that I wanted to visit, the government can shut down access to the server where that website sits, and my link will break. This happened in Turkey—where Wikipedia was shut down last year.

Objects in IPFS are content addressed—you access an object by giving IPFS a cryptographic hash of the object, and IPFS will find someone on the network who has a copy of that object and give you access to it.

To look up a webpage in an IPFS browser, you put the content address in the address bar. When the HTML for that page is received, that page might have lots of other content-addressed files referred to on the page. Your browser can also grab all of those content-addressed files from the IPFS P2P network.

In this episode, David Dias explains how IPFS is designed. David is an engineer at Protocol Labs, the company building out IPFS. This episode is a great companion to our previous show with Juan Benet, the creator of IPFS.

Transcript

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