As the Internet marks 50 years, its co-inventor Vint Cerf, tells us of his concerns for the future and challenges ahead for the web.
An Introduction to The Interplanetary File System
HTTP has served us well, but its time to upgrade the way the Internet works. IPFS provides a solution for the ills of HTTP. It content addresses data instead of location addressing it, and provides more bandwidth, better latency, and more resiliency. We’ll build a simple video streaming web app using IPFS!
IPFS: Interplanetary file storage
InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol and network designed to create a content-addressable, peer-to-peer method of storing and sharing hypermedia in a distributed file system.
Similar to a torrent, IPFS allows users to not only receive but host content. As opposed to a centrally located server IPFS is built around a decentralized system of user-operators who hold a portion of the overall data, creating a resilient system of file storage and sharing.
IPFS is a peer-to-peer distributed file system that seeks to connect all computing devices with the same system of files. IPFS could be seen as a single BitTorrent swarm, exchanging objects within one Git repository. In other words, IPFS provides a high-throughput, [failed verification] content-addressed block storage model, with content-addressed hyperlinks.
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations
A short film about the rise of Decentralized Autonomous Organization with narration by Shermin Voshmgir.
Blockchain is, I would say, not only a technological revolution but first and foremost a socio-economic revolution. The blockchain is a tool to bring us into a more decentralized world.
Why can we disrupt organizations with blockchain? In order to understand this we need to understand the history of the internet.
So if we look back the first generation Internet, in the early 90s, revolutionized information. This is why we called it the information data highway.
About ten years later we have the so-called web 2.0 – the internet became more mature, more programmable and all of a sudden we had on the one hand social media platforms and on the other hand a peer-to-peer economy where the consumer and the producer came, closer to each other of information of opinion of goods and services.
So the original vision of the internet was to be a decentralized world where everyone could put information online.
But in the web, it became very centralized with those platforms. It brought us this peer-to-peer economy but with this huge man in the middle this platform in the middle who started to control all the data and dictates the rules of transactions of that platform.
So instead of the internet becoming more decentralized it became more centralized, and what we’re doing now with blockchain and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and all these other technologies of the decentralized web, is we are redesigning data structures given the fact that we are already living in the connected world. If we think of blockchain in the context of the internet it is the driving technology behind the decentralized web, or also called the Web 3.