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ipld / specs

Content-addressed, authenticated, immutable data structures
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Add motivation section #231

Closed fulldecent closed 4 years ago

fulldecent commented 4 years ago

Please add a motivation section that answers this existential question:

A standard for content-addressed, authenticated, immutable data structures already exists and is implemented on billions of devices (RFC 3986). What additional problems are in-scope for this new standard?

rvagg commented 4 years ago

https://github.com/ipld/specs/blob/master/FOUNDATIONS.md should have most of that type of thing.

URIs don't address immutable data by default and the content and the URI don't necessarily have a direct relationship. i.e. RFC 3986 supports none of these by itself : content-addressed, authenticated, immutable data

IPLD is for data that's more like Git than web content with human-readable addressing. Content addressing means that the address has a direct relationship to the content and if the content changed then the address would necessarily need to change.

fulldecent commented 4 years ago

URIs do address immutable data. Following are just some of the IETF standards and drafts which conform to the URI specification and seem to cover the entire scope of this IPLD project.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6920

https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-farrell-ni-00.xml

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-shi-p2psip-hier-arch-00

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-farrell-decade-ni-06