Everything you need to know about IPFS
A website usually goes down due to censorship, particularly in areas that suppress certain
content or information. It is a matter of centralized service failures, such as a distributed denial
of service (DDOS) attack, or issues related to a domain name system (DNS) or a hosting server.
IPFS, or the InterPlanetary File System is here to help!
IPFS is an open-source Web3 service and a decentralized peer-to-peer file-sharing network that
is designed with an aim to overcome censorship and centralized points of failure in order to make
the web freely accessible to everyone. Users can also back up their digital files, non-fungible
token (NFT) crypto-collectibles, to make sure they don’t disappear from the web.
What is IPFS and how does it work?
The InterPlanetary File System is a service built by Protocol Labs and relies entirely on a
distributed network of computers that host content, including mirrored web pages,
applications, and files.
IPFS directs users towards the content they are looking for instead of normally directing them
towards a location. The content or the website you are looking for, may, however, be stored on
any number of computers or nodes around the world, but it will always be accessible as long as
it is hosted on at least one computer. In order for users to be able to locate files, those
uploaded to IPFS are split into smaller chunks and are then, distributed across several nodes,
and assigned a hash. The whole process is similar to BitTorrent technology in that unlike the
normal web, all IPFS links are based on the unique hash identifier of each item, and do not use
a familiar location-based link.
Although IPFS does not use a blockchain, its contents are unchangeable. However, in order to
maintain the entire history, it lets users add new versions of their preferred files and connect
them to the previous ones.
How to use IPFS?
It is pretty simple! You can use public gateways such as (https://ipfs.io or https://cloudfareipfs.com), which will automatically direct you to the IPFS content or link you are looking for, or
browsers that already have native support for IPFS browsing including Brave and Opera, so all
you have to do is paste the link into your browser.
Here are several Web3 services that are already making use of IPFS.
Audius, the decentralized music service
Filecoin, the decentralized storage network
Pinata, the NFT hosting service
OpenBazaar, the peer-to-peer ecommerce platform
Morpheus.Network, the supply chain blockchain software
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