We talk to W3C board vice-chair Robin Berjon about the InterPlanetary File System The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) debuted nine years ago with the hope of changing the way people interact with content online. It remains an ongoing project. IPFS is part of what's known as the distributed web, a set of decentralized technologies sometimes referred to as Web3 until the NFT-cryptocoin clown car crash …
Merkle DAGs can scale just fine. It's proof-of-work (and to some extent using naive degenerate Merkle graphs) that doesn't scale. But zfs, say, or git, don't have the sort of scaling problems that are typical of cryptocurrencies.
The problem with IPFS is the use of the term "blockchain", not the use of a Merkle graph. In fact IPFS does not use blockchain, because blockchain is a lousy degenerate Merkle graph rather than a general DAG.
《what IPFS actually is or does!》
I am guessing exactly what IPFS is, was dealt with in the first few paras. and rest was about technologies that would use IPFS (and sibling technologies) and the protocols to communicate between these components along with a chunk of philosophy - epistemology and ontology? A bit of a dog's breakfast I suppose.
My take was that IPFS is a distributed content addressable storage system where cryptographic hashes of the content are used to construct the addresses. I imagine a bit like library genesis content.
How you locate and navigate to the content are the concern of other components. My very simplistic analogy might be a book's index. The key words permit the location of the content, the page numbers the navigation although probably a library card catalog might be a better analogy.
Keeping addresses distinct from navigation is probably a good start. :) I can see the need for something like a distributed directory service or routing database in there.
The whole thing, as stated, sounds incredibly complex perhaps too much so and might only ever be implemented in a restricted subset (a bit like ldap cf X.500.)
Rather moot whether any content on the internet will be worth accessing after the forces of enshitification have finished.
Then a full set of the 2012 encyclopaedia britannica might be useful for more than changing light bulbs. :)
It wasn't a great interview for someone who's not already familiar with IPFS.
Personally, I'm not particularly fond of IPFS. The switch from authority-based locators to content-based locators is a different trade-off — it's not automatically superior. In practice, it's very useful to me to know what the authority portion of a URL is before I attempt to follow it (which is one reason why I don't use URL shorteners, and I rarely follow shortened URLs). The authority portion doesn't deserve a lot of trust, but it's a significant update to the model. With a CID you lose that completely.
And we already have a distributed peer-to-peer content-chunk distribution protocol that works quite well: BitTorrent. Yes, BT got a bad reputation because it was widely used for pirating, but that doesn't make it technically inferior. There are arguments for IPFS over BT, but are they compelling?
In general I haven't seen a lot of convincing general use cases for IPFS.
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