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Basically with ipfs you try to download some content by referring to it by a hash. This means that the content will be available forever - as long as there is s
by diegocg 5y ago
Basically with ipfs you try to download some content by referring to it by a hash. This means that the content will be available forever - as long as there is someone willing to cache that content. Which is, obviously, something that won't always happen. But it _can_ theoretically happen, so people with a cache of some old web page may revive it, even after the original site is gone.
- kzrdude 5y agoHow do you refer to something "by name"? Let's say the current version of Wikipedia's article on Lagrange multiplier - the data is changing, so can't use a hash of the content.
- sodality2 5y agoThe hash is not a literal hash of the content- I think it's like a key that lets anyone looking for it ensure it's legitimate. Then the IPFS p2p search mechanism is what lets you find it.
- drdeca 5y agoIn what sense is it not a literal hash? Because it had the prefix at the start to specify what hash to use and the length?
- namibj 5y agoBecause it chunks, it's more similar to a merkle tree than a plain hash.
- drdeca 5y agoThanks, I didn’t think of that
- sodality2 5y ago"of the content" meaning it's not just a sha-N of the file. Unless I misremember the IPFS protocol.
- drdeca 5y agoThanks! I was thinking too vaguely of “hash”, and didn’t think about the requirement that the hash of something large and the hash of that thing but with a big chunk of it replaced with , uh, the hash or some kind of digest of that large bit, be different.
- grumbel 5y agoWith IPFS you access content by hash. So if you have a plain IPFS link to "Lagrange multiplier", it will always point to exactly the same version you are looking at right now. No way to change or update that. If you want to update content, you have to point the user to a new hash. IPFS has the IPNS mechanism for that, this adds a layer of indirection, so instead of pointing to the IPFS hash directly, you point to the IPNS name which in turn points to the current hash. What an IPNS name is pointing to can be updated by the owner of that IPNS name. Another option is to do in via plain old DNS and have the DNS record point to the current hash of the website.