The Inter Planetary File System - IPFS

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The traditional web which was introduced earlier used a centralized network approach. This involves a user who requests data and receives it back from a single main server. Later a distributed network was used which can be thought of as the current web protocol (working of chrome) where the requested data is fetched from a collection of servers working in coordination. But both these approaches had flaws in them.

 1. Failure of the main server or the master server would lead to data unavailability. When the server hosting the data stops hosting for some reason, the data won’t be available to the users. This could be problematic when a user needs data immediately and it is not available. In such cases, a user might incur a loss.


 2. Censorship – Any government, country, or organization may restrict access to websites for reasons like – threat to National security, inappropriate content, secure information, etc. In these cases, data is again not available to the public.


During the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, the Russian government banned access to Instagram as the public was agitated by political posts. 


To address these issues, the IPFS network was developed. 


IPFS – A data storage network emerged to support the growth and development of web3 protocol. Today it has various applications ranging from crypto currencies (Filecoin) to securely storing important data across the world. 


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The Architecture of the network is implemented using the peer-to-peer approach and the network is decentralized. Here, peer to peer means that every node in the network can participate in hosting, storing, and accessing data. No node in the network is superior to other or it doesn’t have any special command over other nodes in the network. 


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Decentralisation of the network allows the protocol to become resistant to censorship and also the network is non-susceptible or immune to denial of service attacks which can lead to node crashes and in turn lead to unavailability of data.


IPFS works on content-based addressing (hash-based addressing) rather than the traditional location-based addressing (IP addressing). Data in the form of text, audio, video, and image can be broken down into small chunks, say 256 bytes, then they are stored in the database as an independent entity. Each entity is of fixed 256 bytes and has a content hash associated with it. The hash is generated using the IPFS hashing algorithms and is unique to each entity in the network. 


The independent entities are merged to form a file system and the root of the file system is given a root hash and this hash will be used to access the whole content in the IPFS network. 


The users of the IPFS protocol will be acting as nodes and whenever they access any data in the network, a copy of that data will be stored in their node so that it is available to other peers nearby.


 The advantages of this protocol are:


 1. If any node in the network goes down, then the requested data will be fetched from other nodes which have a copy of it. Hence data is available all the time unless no node in the network has a copy of the data. 

2. IPFS is faster than the traditional web as it is based on content addressing, any nearby peer node will have the requested data. 

3. The load is equally distributed on all the nodes in the network, so it increases the efficiency of the network. 

4. IPFS service can be used for developing decentralized web applications.


 IPFS is open source built using the Go language and anyone can host their content on the network for free. 


Brave and chrome support IPFS protocol and it can even access data based on the given content Identifier. 


If you would like to check it out for yourselves, the download link is:

https://github.com/ipfs/ipfsdesktop/releases/download/v0.20.4/IPFS-Desktop-Setup0.20.4.exe


For demo paste this link in the brave browser which will host the IPFS logo: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmVp9pSKbXaxk7WWaVg4U8McLDZ1yQdKPznB8PcJfiiN8R?filen ame=demo.png 



By,
Nagaprasad V R

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