Building For a Distributed and Resilient Future … Here’s Pigpen, IPFS and Ethereum
We have created a centralised digital world, and which depends on services running on servers. These servers often centralise the provision of the service and also the data infrastructure. A failure of the service or for the data store can then risk the provision of the service. Along with this, firewalls can get in the way and stop access to information. So what’s the alternative? Well, IPFS (Interplanetary File System) provides a way to distribute files across the world, and where we use a hash value (the CID — Content Identifier — and which is a SHA-256 hash version of the file) to identify content. This overcomes the complex URL structures we have created.
So, why do I need services to locate a file on a disk somewhere, and then match that to a complex URL? Why can’t I just give an identifier to the content, and for the Internet to just find it?
So, I am moving much of my cipher challenge infrastructure towards IPFS and smart contracts. This will mean I do not need to store files on my server or run code on the server to generate the challenge. Let’s now take an example of a Pigpen cipher. Currently, I use my server to generate the challenge and to source the graphics for each Pigpen graphic [here]:
