Can IPFS subvert the HTTP protocol?

How many people knew about IPFS before August 2017? Absolutely none!

IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) network. This comic name is a tribute to computer scientist Joseph Licklider.

When Joseph Licklider was the director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States, he proposed the "InterGalactic Computer Network", which eventually became the world's first operational packet switching network and the ancestor of the global Internet, ARPANET (developed by the US Department of Defense and officially put into operation in November 1969).

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On the other hand, the name IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) also reveals the ambition of IPFS: to provide people with a reliable and efficient way of data transmission, so that even if humans migrate to Mars, they can still transmit data between stars.

This Internet protocol, which was launched in May 2015, is little known because it lacks an incentive layer. Therefore, the clever Protocol Labs developed an incentive layer Filecoin based on IPFS.

Everyone says that EOS is the 3.0 era of blockchain, but I think IPFS and Filecoin are the top projects in the 3.0 era of blockchain. Interestingly, there are nearly a hundred blockchain projects based on IPFS, but IPFS itself is not a blockchain project. Filecoin is a blockchain project.

Compared with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and EOS, the popularity of IPFS and Filecoin is not worth mentioning. The launch time of Filecoin is unknown, and it may even fail. IPFS has very few nodes in the world, and even fewer in China. So, compared with the well-known top coins and projects, it is not an exaggeration to say that it is timid! But why is it so timid? I still choose to go all in, and recharge my faith unswervingly, continuously and endlessly. Let's take a look at its magic.

IPFS can bypass blockade

In May 2017, the Turkish government ordered a blockade of Wikipedia after the encyclopedia refused to delete a paragraph about the Turkish government and Syrian jihadists.

Turkish citizens were able to circumvent the blockade by storing the Turkish Wikipedia on a distributed network.

In October 2017, the Catalonia region of Spain decided to hold a referendum on independence. The Spanish government blocked all websites with Catalan domain names to prevent the referendum from taking place.

However, the Catalan government and the people built the voting website on a distributed network, and more than 40% of citizens still successfully participated in the voting.

The ambition of IPFS is far more than just breaking through the blockade. Its ultimate ideal is to make distributed storage a part of the computer file system. This project aims to solve the fundamental problems of current Internet data transmission: data is overly dependent on a single node, transmission efficiency is low; data is not effectively encrypted, user privacy cannot be guaranteed; web pages and links often expire after a few days, the content can no longer be retrieved, and human history disappears.

Subverting HTTP

The current valuation of DropBox, a foreign cloud storage company, is about US$10 billion. The total market value of 45 listed cloud service companies in the United States is nearly US$200 billion, with an average market value of US$1.6 billion.

The entire cloud service market share is about 1000 billion 7 US dollars. What IPFS wants to do is not just a simple cloud storage.

What does IPFS use to replace HTTP?

In addition to the advantages of HTTP, IPFS also makes up for the shortcomings of HTTP, making us surf the Internet faster, download faster, and more secure. If you say that IPFS is a cross-era, impeccable product, it is definitely not, but it is the prototype and template for the current Internet revolution, just like Bitcoin, which has shortcomings such as long transaction time, high transaction fees, and large price fluctuations. However, without Bitcoin, there would be no Ethereum and the booming blockchain. It is because of the original models such as IPFS, Bitcoin, and Ethereum as the foundation that more technologies and ideas can become reality.

IPFS has very high security

The cloud storage provided by Alibaba Cloud, Baidu Cloud and other companies we use now is a pseudo-***, and does not realize real cloud storage. All our data will be stored in the server. Once the computer room is damaged, everything we have stored in it will be lost. In addition, there are some crawlers in the data that will check every day to see which ones are unhealthy. In fact, the administrator of the computer room can also check it. Users have no privacy at all.

China has a population of 800 million between the ages of 20 and 80, but our mobile phone numbers and other personal information are bought more than 6 billion times every year. On average, each person’s information is bought and sold 8 times each year, because our data is stored in Alibaba Cloud, Baidu Cloud, and the like.

The disadvantages of cloud storage include leaks, slow speed, and the buying and selling of personal information. IPFS solves these problems very well. Only the things stored in IPFS can be viewed by the user with the secret key. Imagine if it is an enterprise, it will definitely use IPFS to store some company privacy or operations, and no one will know. If the financial department tampers with the data, the data can be restored at any time, and there is no way to falsify it. This must be a service that enterprises need very much.

Whether it is an enterprise or an individual, faced with this kind of storage method with zero fees, no privacy leakage, and never loss, they will definitely choose IPFS without hesitation.

IPFS is the “Internet of Things”

So far, many projects have adopted IPFS for development. For example: Akasha BlockCat, Mana, ZenCash, Beetoken, etc. The Ethereum Prince ETF, which made a lot of noise some time ago, will also adopt the ETH+IPFS architecture. In the future, IPFS will definitely be widely used in finance, medical care, technology and other industries. Once we seize the opportunity now, IPFS will create huge profits for us.

In addition, IPFS will also change everyone's pain points when surfing the Internet. When surfing the Internet, everyone must have experienced the 404 (page not found) situation. There are many reasons for this, it may be that the server is down, or it may be that the server is broken due to some external reasons.

However, IPFS does not have a centralized server, and all files in the IPFS system will be recorded completely (unless the owner deliberately deletes them). Because the Git mechanism is used, all modification records of files in the network will be retained to the greatest extent. When using IPFS to store files, you no longer have to worry about files being destroyed due to natural disasters or man-made disasters.

IPFS's algorithm is not perfect but impeccable

In addition to finding nodes through algorithms such as DHT, another key technology of distributed storage is content addressing. In the current HTTP/HTTPS network, the domain name entered by the user (such as https://www.google.com or https://www.baidu.com) is parsed layer by layer and corresponds to the server address before the user establishes a connection with the server. In the content addressing mode adopted by IPFS, the user only needs to directly enter the fingerprint of the required file (such as the HTML file of the website homepage), and the program can find the node with the data in the network to establish a link and transmit the data.

This file fingerprint is also called hash, which is the result of the calculation of the hash function. The hash function works like a digital summary, converting data of any length into a string of fixed length. At the same time, as long as the original data changes, the calculated hash will be different. Using hash as the URL means that the same URL will always get the same file, and the web link is always reliable, so IPFS is also called the "Permanent Web".

The hash of a file can be added to another file and then a hash function is performed to form a second hash. In this way, different files can be connected to each other through hashes to form a file tree, and large files can be divided into blocks and then strung together. This structure is called a hash tree (or Merkle Tree), which is a data structure that is gradually becoming popular in distributed systems. Whether it is the commonly used code management tool git, the Bittorrent that is spread all over the world, or a variety of blockchains, they are all some form of hash trees that can be directly stored in the IPFS network and efficiently identified and called.

IPFS created Filecoin because data also needs a certain degree of "redundancy" to ensure that there are multiple copies in the network. At the same time, some nodes need to be online for a long time to keep the data readable. IPFS+Filecoin is expected to compete with cloud service providers such as Amazon, Google and Alibaba.

Ten years have passed since the first Bitcoin appeared. After Bitcoin and Ethereum, blockchain has evolved to the 3.0 era. Today, Bitcoin and Ethereum are both weak due to their own shortcomings. Everyone is waiting for the emergence of a new "coin king" in the blockchain 3.0 era. IPFS/Filecoin are well-deserved, absolutely the best in the world.