I love that name. It appeals to my inner nerd. Very sci-fi.
I’ve been playing around with IPFS for a couple of weeks now, trying to understand the problem it’s designed to address and how it intends to address it. While it’s early days yet, and this project is not (IMHO) ready for general use, its ambitions have caught my fancy. The idea of creating a decentralized file storage system. on a global, and maybe someday interplanetary scale appeals to me. Rather than the expensive, fragmented, proprietary cloud file systems we use today, IPFS’s design proposes that computers on the network can cooperate and individually share a fraction of their resources to create a single, distributed file system that stores public information and makes it available to anyone who chooses to join in.
It’s simple to join a computer to the IPFS today, simply download and run a single executable in daemon mode, i.e., as a system service, and it’s done. Storing files in the IPFS is done by connecting a web browser to the web UI provided by that daemon. Point-and-click, drag-and-drop. Likewise, files stored in the IPFS by others can be accessed on the web using links that they provide, or by searching the global content of the IPFS using a search engine.
In reality, again, it is still early days. Doing these things isn’t perhaps as seamless as I’ve made it sound, but the basics are in place, and improvements are being made day by day. I’ve always believed that the advent of a single, ubiquitous, shared file system is inevitable. I love that IPFS is here now and provides a practical place to experiment with these concepts.
