Why you should try IPFS
Today, I will try to convince you to at least try IPFS.
Integrity built in.
Let me explain the difference between content-based addressing and location-based addressing. This will help you understand how the integrity works:
- Location-based addressing is where a client would know exactly where a file is.
- Content-based addressing is where a client would ask what the contents of a file is, verifying the contents were not modified using a hash. So, unlike Location-based addressing (HTTP), it has more security.
Peer-to-Peer file storage
You can say goodbye to those servers hosting your data (such as AWS S3 and Google Drive) and say hello to Peers! What is a peer? Peers can be a client, and a server. They can replace servers if there are enough of them. Why peers instead of a server? If a peer goes down, other peers can give you the data you need. But if a server goes down, that data is gone until the server is back up.
A programmatic API.
Like many things, it has an API. From running a node (peer) on your web browser (js-ipfs) to interacting with nodes hosted on a user's computer (See their docs for their HTTP API).
Those were some things I wanted to talk about because not many people are willing to try IPFS. If you want to learn more about IPFS, you can check out the (many) links below:
- Awesome IPFS - a awesome list of projects that are made/are using IPFS.
- ipfs.io - The main website for IPFS
- Install IPFS
- IPFS docs - The official docs for IPFS. They have many tutorials on how to deploy websites to IPFS and how to install IPFS
- Get started with IPFS in the browser
- Get started with IPFS in Node.js