Hey whats going on guys, Ethan here back again with another awsome post.In this post i'll be sharing my views on IPFS so lets get started.
The Interplanetary File System or IPFS is a new protocol that could upgrade the entire internet.
A protocol is just a set of rules written with software and the internet is made up of a handfull of them. They all handle different things.Email , data transfer, page layout, a bunch of stuff.
The HTTP protocol is the most popular one. You know how when you go to a website and it says, HTTP at the begining of the url bar? That's because your web browser is using the HTTP protocol to retrieve the page. HTTP was created by a straight G named Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. It defines two entities.A client.And a server.And it enables each to request data from other back and forth.
If the request was successful, a response is sent back. So when you type in http://google.com in your browser, which is the client, it uses HTTP to request the google main page. And Google's server uses HTTP to send it to you as a response. That's it. That simple protocol is the backbone of the entire world wide web.
It connects all of our computing devices together.Phoens,Tabs,Laptops,everything.
But HTTP isn't good enough anymore, infact its kind of totally broken.HTTP has made the Web become totally "CENTRALIZED". That means a handful of apps own all of our data. They profit off of our data that we give freely to them in return for a free service (SPOILER:just like Facebook did).
Wile this may seem cool at first, this is actually shrinking the economy.
We're living in a data economy, data is the asset of this new world.In a good economy we should be monetizing more and more.But in a centralized internet,We're monetizing less and less.These central servers are getting more and more powerful by absorbing all of our data.
Servers are given a unique IP address which defines its location.if that location is far away it takes longer to retrive data.And because data is location addressed, if that location gets shut down.That data is lost forever. All of it! It's just not sustainable. But maybe we could make a permanent Web. A Web where links never dies. That's the vision of IPFS. its a peer to peer protocol, there's no central server people conncet to each other directly . That means if you built a website on IPFS, it could never be shut down by anyone,even if a Gov. shuts down internet access during protests.People could still communicate with each other offline with IPFS. That has the potential to save actual human lives. And data would be owned by us, the people.Not by One group.We could get paid for our data,instead of one group profitting off of all of it. and because IPFS is p2p,data transfer is much faster.The network gives data a content address.Not an IP addss.So if you want to load a website, instead of your computer requesting from a server across the world, it'll find the nearest copy.And if multiple people have copies of it,your computer would request it from all of them at the same time.The more the peers, the faster the download.
IPFS is gonna help our computers talk to each other much more efficiently, and one day if we become the interplanetary species,IPFS could be the protocol we use to communicate with each other.
Chech out:https://ipfs.io/ to start learning more about and ways that you can help and build Dapps with it.
Thanks for taking your time and reading this post.
You Guys are Awsome.
Just letting you know.