InterPlanetary File System(IPFS) — Future of the Web
IPFS or InterPlanetary File System is a peer-peer hypermedia protocol which utilises a distributed file system. Which basically means it’s another internet protocol. But it is not just another ordinary protocol. It has certain features which make it stand out and it has the potential to become the future protocol of the web.
HTTP — Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, developed by Tim Berners-Lee is the most widely used protocol today, but it seems to be getting older and unable to keep up with the fast-growing web.
Problems with HTTP:
- The number of internet users has been constantly increasing. Therefore, the number of users requesting data is also constantly increasing. To provide these data to the users, HTTP seizes a huge amount of bandwidth available, even if the people who request the data are in proximity to each other. This is just not efficient enough considering the vast amount of data available.
- The speed of light, it is a huge bottleneck as a transfer of data cannot surpass that speed. Hence, the reasonable thing to do would be to bring the servers close to you. Therefore, when you request the data, it would reach you sooner. But still, if you are requesting some data and coincidentally it is located in a system just a few metres away from you, it would be faster if the data is just pulled from that system rather than going through the backbone of the web and the request being transferred to another city closer to you and returned.
- I am sure everybody has seen this error before, it is a 404 error, which means the content is broken or deleted. The major problem with HTTP links is that it is unreliable, the links get broken a lot of times. Also, if the content is deleted it is lost forever unless someone has manually copied the data. For example, if someone hacks the Wikipedia page and deletes all of its contents, they are gone forever unless someone has manually backed up the data
- The biggest problem of all with HTTP(from my perspective) is that it is centralised. This gives immense power to few individuals who own the data and access to the data can be easily restricted by governments and certain individuals if they wish to do so.
IPFS fixes these issues and helps us move toward a secure, efficient and inexpensive web.
How does IPFS fix them?
- IPFS uses a content addressing method compared to IP addressing method used by HTTP. Using content address fetches the data faster as it will retrieve the data from the closest system which has a copy of it. Since it is content addressed you might ask, how does IPFS differentiate the webpages? It does so by generating a unique address for each page. The content is identified by a cryptographically generated hash which cannot be changed.
- IPFS uses a Distributed Hash Table to store the data on various systems. An example of DHT is Chord.
- To have control over the DHT and give structure to it, IPFS uses the Merkle DAG protocol inspired by git. Git uses this protocol for version control whereas IPFS uses it for providing a structure.
- Another advantage of IPFS is that the user can download parts of a file from various sources at once and combine it at their side rather than downloading the whole file from a single source.
I guess now you would understand why IPFS is regarded as the future of the web.
Interesting Fact: The reason it was named Interplanetary File system is because, when humans become a interplanetary species, it would be sensible to fetch the data from the closest user than from planets light years away :)
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