InterPlanetary File System (IPFS)
What is this all about?
The main reason why I am looking into IPFS is because of the rise of NFTs. As you all know it, an image of your favorite pasttime meme can now be sold for thousands if not millions of dollars. And due to the decentralized nature of blockchain which NFTs operate on, I was wondering how are the images and videos being hosted and distributed?
Turns out many NFTs are turning to InterPlanetary File System, a peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol that powers the Distributed Web.
Shared Responsibility
Traditional Hosting
Traditional hosting of hypermedia is by a single domain owner, where they have to keep servers running to ensure that the files remain online. For example, Instagram stores all your images and instagram stories onto their servers and have the sole responsibility to keep them running. This also mean that they have the power to take down and remove your files and images from the web at any point in time.
Many services rely heavily on Amazon Web Service data center to keep their servers running. On 22nd December 2021, AWS faced its third outage of the month which impacted many major services with huge user base such as Coinbase and Fortnite.
Distributed Hosting on IPFS
IPFS utilizes distributed peer-to-peer (P2P) network to host hypermedia, resulting in a multitude of hosts instead of a single domain owner. As long as someone on the IPFS network is hosting the file, it will be available to the rest of the network. This is similar to the P2P Torrent concept that some of us are familiar with.
The Test of Time
IPFS claims that this method of storing files can stand the test of time, while files on centralized network may only last as long as the hosting company. This is with the assumption that the IPFS is universally adopted with every piece of file hosted by at least someone.
Locating a File
Location Based Addressing
URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) as the name implies, are the address to look for data on the centralized web. URLs are based on the location where the data is stored, and this is called Location Addressing.
Let's say we are accessing data using the url, https://www.kitty.com/kittens.jpg. We would first access the domain name, kitty.com,
before referencing to the location where data we are looking for, kittens.jpg is stored. In this case, kitten.jpg does not have to be
an image of kittens and could even be an image of babies. This shows that there is no relationship between the image and the location where
it is stored, thus location-based addressing.
This makes it easy to store duplicated files and images as each host can store the same files under different addresses - leading to a lot of redundancy.
Content Based Addressing
Content addressing on the other hand, is a way to find data in a network using its content instead of
its location. This is done by taking the content of a file and hashing it, producing its Content Identifier (CID).
The CID can then be used to access files and data on the IPFS network that matches the hash.
Benefits of Content Addressing:
- Censorship resistant
- Reduced load time
- Lesser redundancy