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IPFS: Technology Used

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Today I started getting a feel for what Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is about. What I found really interesting is that although it is fairly new technology it is built up from a combination of technologies that are pretty mature. I am still busy wrapping my head around getting a deeper understanding of how it works but in a nutshell IPFS is:

  • a distributed P2P filesystem to store and share content addressable hypermedia
  • similar idea to web but:
    • items are content addressed as opposed to location addressed
    • can rather be viewed as a single BitTorrent swarm
    • objects are exchanged within one Git repository

The key technologies used by IPFS to enable this are:

  • Distributed Sloppy Hash Tables (DSHT) - for routing
  • Bitswap - for data distribution
  • Git - for data versioning
  • Self-certified file systems - for validating the validity of IPFS addresses