Wednesday W.O.W - The Interplanetary File System 🪐🗄️🪐
[5 min read] Your mid-week bite sized treat on emerging tech on our journey to the Metaverse. IPFS allows a more decentralised, resilient, and open internet that puts users in control of their data.
A nibble of knowledge in your inbox every Wednesday with a simple format:
🇼 What the technology is
🇴 Objective(s) - what is it trying to achieve, with some examples
🇼 Why it is important to users as well as businesses & brands.
This is week 24 of the 520 weeks of writing I have committed to, a decade of documenting our physical and digital lives converge.
🇼 What is IPFS?
IPFS, developed by Protocol Labs, is short for Interplanetary File Storage. It is a decentralized file system protocol that allows files to be uploaded and assigned a unique signature, and then stored by multiple nodes on the network. Anyone with the signature can access the file from any of the nodes storing it, which provides resilience and ensures the file's availability on the internet.
One of the strengths of using IPFS as a protocol is that your system becomes part of a decentralized network, helping to spread and distribute information. By using IPFS to download files from another system, your computer also becomes a distributor.
🇴 What objectives is IFPS trying to achieve?
The web today is highly centralized, and power is held in the hands of a few powerful corporations. This leads to the absolute control of information, how we see information and exploitation via the taking of advantage of how we now perceive things. This is where IPFS comes in. IPFS is at the forefront of powering the Distributed Web and solving the challenges of the centralized web.
One of the objectives of IFPS is to provide a more efficient, secure, and reliable way to share data. IFPS achieves this by using a peer-to-peer protocol that asks lots of connected computers on the network to share information that a user requests for, via the file's content.
Another key objective of IFPS is to provide a censorship-resistant platform. Because of its decentralized nature, there is no single point of failure that could be targeted by censors. For example, if a website is hosted on IPFS, it is accessible even if the government in a particular region decides to block access to the IPFS network. Power to the people!
🇼 Why could IFPS be important to the future for users as well as organizations?
IFPS provides a more efficient, secure, and reliable way to share data. Users can share data without the fear of censorship or the data being compromised by a centralized authority.
For organizations, IFPS provides an opportunity to store and share data in a decentralized network. This makes it harder for hackers to gain unauthorized access to the data. Additionally, because the network is decentralized, there is no single point of failure that could bring down the entire network.
IPFS has the potential to enable a more decentralized, resilient, and open internet that puts users in control of their data and online interactions. The following are use cases:
Storing assets: By storing project assets on IPFS, benefits such as content de-duplication, reduced hosting costs, and increased uptime of the service can be obtained. Decentraland uses IPFS to store heavy files for faster loading and syncing.
Video hosting platform: DTube hosts videos on IPFS to reduce stress on its infrastructure.
“Dead man's switch”: Killcord publicly publishes data automatically if the user doesn't check in after some time. Often used by journalists or whistleblowers fearing their life.
Decentralized robots: KODA is developing Koda-9, the world's first decentralized robot dog that uses IPFS to store user data such as security footage.
Deploy your website on IPFS: Fleek.co lets developers build and deploy sites and apps on IPFS.
SecureMyState: A government-citizen communication app that lets Colorado citizens manage state-owned data about themselves.
Decentralized Social Media: IPFS could be used to create decentralized social media platforms, where users own their data and have more control over their online identities. These platforms can also be resistant to censorship and have increased privacy.
Distributed File Sharing: IPFS can be used for distributed file sharing, which can be faster, more efficient, and more secure than traditional centralized file-sharing methods. Great for whistleblowers, and those wanting to bypass authoritarian regimes without a free press.
NFT media: NFTs live on a blockchain, and the ownership can be verified through the blockchain. However, the underlying digital asset, such as the JPEG file of the artwork, needs to be stored somewhere. By using IPFS to store the JPEG file, it can be easily accessible to anyone who wants to view the NFT artwork without worrying about the file being lost or corrupted, or a centralised server going down.
Bonus: How does Filecoin contribute to IPFS?
Filecoin works synergistically with IPFS to provide a decentralized storage solution that complements the content-addressable nature of IPFS. This enables users to store and access their files in a more secure, reliable, and efficient manner on the decentralized web.
Filecoin can be imagined as a decentralized storage network that complements IPFS by providing a market for storage providers to offer their services and earn rewards for storing and retrieving data. Filecoin enables users to rent unused storage space on other users' devices in exchange for Filecoin tokens.
IPFS and Filecoin are designed to work together seamlessly, allowing users to store and access files on the decentralized web in a more reliable and efficient manner. When a user adds a file to IPFS, they can choose to store it on their own device or on a remote storage provider through Filecoin.
Filecoin provides an incentive mechanism for storage providers to offer their services, ensuring that there is always sufficient storage capacity available for users to store and access their files. Without this, IPFS would not thrive!
That’s all for this week! If you have any organisations in mind that could benefit from learning about emerging technology, be sure to reach out. Educational workshops are one of many consulting services I offer.