IPFS, a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol designed to make the web faster, safer, and more open.

[danielarmengolaltayo]

IPFS aims to surpass HTTP in order to build a better web for all of us.

• Today's web is inefficient and expensive
• Today's web can't preserve humanity's history (the average lifespan of a web page is 100 days before it's gone forever)
• Today's web is centralized, limiting opportunity
• Today's web is addicted to the backbone

Here's how IPFS works. Take a look at what happens when you add a file to IPFS.

• Your file, and all of the blocks within it, is given a unique fingerprint called a cryptographic hash.
• IPFS removes duplications across the network.
• Each network node stores only content it is interested in, plus some indexing information that helps figure out which node is storing what.
• When you look up a file to view or download, you're asking the network to find the nodes that are storing the content behind that file's hash.
• You don't need to remember the hash, though — every file can be found by human-readable names using a decentralized naming system called IPNS.

@ipfs on GitHub.

Project by Protocol Labs.

→ This conversation is referenced in this repo by @danielarmengolaltayo

[danielarmengolaltayo]

"The next Internet Revolution". Talk by Juan Benet about IPFS.

Some highlights:

• Internet is humanity's most important technology, it's our shared nervous system, our shared brain.
• The web has problems (emerging networks, huge inefficiency, bad security model, links break, no offline use, censorship)
• Frustrations:
  • A URL has a flaw, it's based on location addressing. The domain name resolves to an IP address, the address of a specific server on one specific physical machine. So when you load the link you are forced to fetch the file from that one server. It doesn't matter if you have it locally. It doesn't matter if you can find it in other computers right next to you. You have to fetch it from that one server.
  • We lost something when we moved from physical information that's printed to digital information. We lost some properties. When you get a piece of paper you can hold it, you can you can store the information somewhere you can back it up, you can pull it back out later and it you have control over it. That's not the case in the web. When you have a link that's not yours it's somebody else's and they might move, it they might change, it they might shut it down. And so every independent copy of something on the web is its own entity, it's not copies of the same thing you can't treat them the same.
• The solution is actually quite simple [...] it's called content addressing.
  • IPFS decentralizes the web itself. It addresses information by what it is, not where it is. It separates what from where.
• IPFS project is about fixing these kinds of fundamental problems.
• This is what we call the interplanetary principle. Design things for planets, planetary scale, and you'll do very well on Earth.
• IPFS is upgrading the web.

[danielarmengolaltayo]

For the philosophical part behind IPFS, addressing the question "why they are doing what they are doing", a couple of talks also by Juan Benet, with a few years' difference between them, same discourse + intro to IPFS. Some highlights below.

Distributed Apps with IPFS - Full Stack Fest 2016

• 3 problems:
  • Secure communications for humanity (Internet + Tor)
  • Secure computation for humanity (Web + IPFS)
  • Secure flourishing of Knowledge (Wikipedia, Archives, Science, IPFS)

Why IPFS? - IPFS Camp Barcelona 2019

• At the end of the day it's just about some machine computing a function and some data being fed into that function and transmitted it over some wires. There's a lot more in the details but at the core of the main innovations to computing it's just better and better ways of moving around functions, better and better ways of moving around data. [...] At the end of the day it's just about data and programs.
• We're part of something extremely special that is changing how how humanity operates and we have not just the ability to influence it for for good but we have, I think, a duty and then responsibility to make sure that this goes well.

I personally find it interesting to find in the comments people who don't care too much about why.