IPFS or HTTP

Today I am going to talk about IPFS and what it is. IPFS or InterPlanentary File systems is a protocol and peer to peer distributed file system. You can compare IPFS to HTTP, which I will discuss soon.

Right now when we surf the web our data is being kept tracked by big tech companies such as Google and Facebook. They are able to store the data that they have about each user in a central location and use the data however they would like to. We as a user do not have any control over the data that they have.

Lets talk about how centralized applications store data and how IPFS stores data. In centralized applications location based addressing is used and IPFS uses content based addressing as you can see below.

With IPFS you are able to store the following:

text

images

videos

websites

dapps

The data is stored decentralized and you have control over your data not another company. That is powerful because you as a user have full control of the data that you produce. The data can not be changed or manipulated by another user.

Many companies are using IPFS, such as Brave, Audius and Fleek to name a few. IPFS is a really powerful tool and I look forward to using it in future projects.

Here is a link to the IPFS white paper if you would like to learn more about the protocol.

Thanks for reading.

Happy coding!