Imagine a file system that runs on computers around the planet. This file system shares a common way for every node to find the data you ask it for, just by the content of the file's hash. It doesn’t need a centralized naming system or authority to maintain a list of these locations.
Now imagine, with proper design and implementation, what this interplanetary file system could do compared to today’s world wide web. It is real today and getting closer to being a thing most people know about and/or will use.
Inter Planetary File System, or IPFS, made the news this week in a significant way when it was announced that the Brave web browser is going to have a built‐in client for the IPFS protocol. IPFS has been online since February 2015 and has been growing as a technology ever since.
Like many similar concepts in BitTorrent and Blockchain, IPFS is rooted in the idea of a decentralized system. Today's web is based on a centralized location‐based addressing with DNS. At any point, any website can be essentially taken offline by DNS removing the name pointer to that website.
Using content‐based addressing, IPFS allows computers to access objects/files around the world hosted on computers by their pointers, which are based on hashes. This allows files to be accessed via a decentralized network not reliant on DNS like today’s websites. It even allows naming via IPNS (Inter Planetary Naming System), utilizing the same technology.
Along with blockchain and peer‐to‐peer based design, the protocol supports many features such as versioning, immutability, folder structures, redundancy, and caching. All of this is done securely and in a way that cannot be easily censored, such as when countries like China or, more recently, Turkey, try to block information from being seen by citizens.
Check out more at the link below and try it out in the simplest way with Brave browser:
Inter Planetary File System https://ipfs.io/
Brave Browser https://brave.com/
Wikipedia is already mirrored on IPFS, along with many other web sites. The following is a link that connects a standard browser through a gateway to IPFS for systems that do not have the client installed: https://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/ QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/wiki/IPFS.html
For more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Uj6uR3fp‐U
