IPFS Powers the Distributed Web(ipfs.io) |
IPFS Powers the Distributed Web(ipfs.io) |
IPFS is heavily used for NFTs.
Imaging paying for artwork and not downloading a copy because you think it’s archived. Poor art buyers.
I guess the magnet link still has to ask a tracking server that knows some peer addresses already right? Whereas an ipfs node can dive into the DHT and start searching for a peer?
Perhaps the key difference is that torrents (targets for magnet links) can't link to other torrents, at least not in a way the protocol is aware of. Each torrent swarm is something of an island. IPFS is more like one big graph ("web") of documents/files.
https://gist.github.com/mattdesl/47f4ea12ea131eed8401bdacf95...
What a piece of work is man...
IPFS puts file/object hashes in the DHT so they are directly discoverable, meaning people coming to the same object from different from different places can find one another. It also allows one object to be explicitly addressed via an ancestor object's hash (<hash>/path/to/object), which has various benefits.
But also the downside of being incompatible with the BitTorrent network and it's myriad of seeders and torrents.
I think quite a few P2P projects have thrown out compatibility for the sake of some functionality but also the entire baby. PeerTube did the same, disabled WebTorrent support by-default before any BitTorrent clients got WT support. The desire to "move fast" makes people forget what actually makes a system usable and how decades of inertia changes how changes can be made. Impatience.