3 ms·
> humans like names, and like hierarchy. They do, but that does not mean there should not be other ways to access data. Hashes are universal and unambiguous.
by grondilu 12y ago
> humans like names, and like hierarchy.
They do, but that does not mean there should not be other ways to access data. Hashes are universal and unambiguous. There should be a way to retrieve a file given its hash.
> You could create a URL scheme called "hash" but it would be hard to see how you could design a standard resolver unless it was one big centralized hash table in the sky - you still would need to, at the very least, map objects to IP addresses.
There would be an underlying P2P protocol that cp would use. On the other hand, cp doesn't even use FTP or HTTP so maybe that's too much to ask.
Maybe with curl or wget, then.
- wpietri 12y agoWhy should there be that? You're talking about an enormous, complicated system. What's the use case that justifies the effort?
- parasubvert 12y ago> Hashes are universal and unambiguous. There should be a way to retrieve a file given its hash. I'm not sure you've thought through the complexity of what you're asking for. Hashes require (a) a hash function everyone agrees to, (b) a way to resolve them to an IP address. Unless you synchronized all global hashes across the Internet on everyone's computer (the git hashed project model -- which we know doesn't scale beyond a certain point unless you bucket things into independent hashes you care about), you'd basically have to do something like Hash://ip_address/bucket/hash or hash://bucket/hash if you want to give a monopoly to one IP address that manages giant hash in the sky Which is back to URLs and HTTP, and no different from say Amazon S3
- oakwhiz 12y agoBitTorrent magnet links already kind of do this. Theoretically speaking, isn't it possible to create a virtual BitTorrent FUSE filesystem?