Background
Some info:
Stanford Seminar, IPFS and the Permanent Web, October 22, 2015.
Main problem points with current web: offline, distributed, permanence, security, speed, lack of richer communication protocols.
Merkle Web, Merkle Tree, Merkle Links: protocol to upgrade how the web works. Related to git’s merkledag. Instead of using a centralized address to locate, use a combination of data x hash function as the address, that way it can be shared.
A quick summary:
Taking a higher-level approach to network design, like Paul Baran and some of the earliest categorization of networks, as featured in 1964’s On Distributed Communications. See network designs for centralized, distributed, peer, isolated, etc.
There is also no ‘presence linking’ in the status quo, meaning that there isn’t a notion for a peer to announce itself in several transports, so that other peers can guarantee that it is always the same peer.
This is especially problematic when sharing media. Any file, any media: when shared on a centralized network, the total amount of data required to share is the size of the original media times multiplied by the number of shares (modulo caching, if be). Ten or 20x multiples are common.
The solution is a distributed web with content uniquely identified, so it can be properly served by multiple peers in a resilient manner. In addition, this works for disconnected, offline, and slow networks.
Instead, social platforms are throwing tons of capital to build walled gardens on centralized networks. Apps continue to dominate the mobile web.
Some hype:
TEDxSanFrancisco, The Next Internet Revolution, December, 2016.
There is documentation for the distributed web as a free gitbook, The Decentralized Web Primer.
Sources, Protocol Specifications
InterPlanetary File System wikipedia.
The IPFS Project, a hypermedia transport protocol project. Based on a network stack encoded in libp2p. See specs documentation here. The naming system is IPNS.
Online community is found here.
Part of Protocol Labs
Questions
what about other peer to peer networking libraries, namely libtorrent? libp2p design compare?
language bindings for libp2p are javascript, go, rust, python. What else is in development?
See Also
rewind r3w1nd 
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