The Interplanetary File System

Key Takeaways

Hello world, Siraj here. The interplanetary file system or IPFS is a new protocol that can upgrade the entire internet. A protocol is just a set of rules written with software and the internet is made up of a bunch of them. They all handle different things. Email, data transfer, page layout, a bunch of stuff. The HTTP protocol is the most popular one. You know how when you go to a website, it says HTTP at the beginning of the URL bar? That's because your web browser is using the HTTP protocol to retrieve the page. HTTP was created by a script G named Tim Berners Lee in 1989. It defines two entities, a client and a server, and it enables each to request data from the other back and forth. If the request was successful, a response is sent back. So when you type in http/google.com in your browser, which is the client, it uses HTTP to request to Google main page. And Google server uses HTTP to send it to you as a response. That's it. That simple protocol is the backbone of the entire worldwide web. It connects all of our computing devices together. Phones, tablets, laptops, everything. But HTTP isn't good enough anymore. In fact, it's kind of totally broken. HTTP has made the web become totally centralized. That means a handful of apps own all of our data. They profit off of our data that we freely give to them in return for a free service. While this may seem cool at first, this is actually shrinking the economy. We're living in a data economy. Data is the asset of this new world. In a good economy, we should be monetizing more and more. But in a centralized internet, we're monetizing less and less. These central servers are getting more and more powerful by absorbing all of our data. Servers are given a unique IP address which defines its location. If that location is far away, it takes longer to retrieve the data. And because data is location addressed, if that location gets shut down, that data is lost forever. All of it. It's just not sustainable. But maybe we could make a permanent web, a web where links never die. That's the vision of IPFS. It's a peer-to-peer protocol. There's no central server. People connect to each other directly. That means if you built a website on IPFS, it could never be shut down by anyone. Even if a government shuts down internet access during protests, people could still communicate with each other offline with IPFS. That has the potential to save actual human lives. And data would be owned by us, the people, not by one group. We could get paid for our data instead of one group profiting off of all of it. And because IPFS is peer-to-peer, data transfer is much, much faster. The network gives data a content address, not an IP address. So if you want to load a website, instead of your computer requesting it from a server across the world, it'll find a nearest copy. Maybe that random dude sitting next to you in chemistry has it on his laptop and your computer would retrieve it from there directly. And if multiple people have copies of it, your computer would request it from all of them at the same time. The more peers, the faster the download. Videos would load so much faster. You could download games 10 times faster. It's just better in every way. IPFS is going to help our computers talk to each other much more efficiently. And one day, if we become an interplanetary species, IPFS could be the protocol we use to communicate with each other. If you're on Mars, you don't want to have to stream that video from Earth if your friend sitting next to you in the Martian Dome already has it. Check out ipfs.io io to start learning more about it and ways that you can build decentralized apps with it. There are a couple of great demos to get started right on the website. If you'd like to see more technology videos, please subscribe. I'd really appreciate it. And as always, thanks for watching.