IPFS, The Interplanetary File System, Simply Explained

Re:IPFS, The Interplanetary File System, Simply Explained by ntninja on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @03:50PM (#18658725)

True, but one big caveat with BitTorrent is that if you change 1 byte in the whole (often multi-file) thing the info-hash will be different and you'll end up in a new DHT entry all by yourself. With IPFS you'd still share all the other blocks of content with the whole network, only the modified block will be “yours alone”.

Where this happens to be particularly annoying with BitTorrent are aggregate Torrents: You have a bunch of separate files available for download (think TV series or books) each forming its own DHT node. Then somebody decides to create an aggregate torrent (such as libgen's “1000 books” torrents) and offers that for convenience or efficiency reasons. Will the clients that previously downloaded the individual files share them with this new torrent? No! Because the new Torrent “is different” even if each of it's files are byte-by-byte identical.

Could BitTorrent be upgraded to allow for this? Probably, but it'd be radical paradigm-shift requiring a redesign of everything (“BitTorrent 2.0”). So why not start from scratch with a new protocol entirely?

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Re:IPFS, The Interplanetary File System, Simply Explained by zaarn on Tuesday December 11, 2018 @03:57PM (#18658776)

There are actually several protocol updates in the works (and some fundamental work like pubsub has been finished) to enable torrents that can be upgraded, it doesn't require a radical paradigm-shift at all.

A protocol that does what torrent does but better would be dat://, IPFS is terrible at being BitTorrent but better.

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