As we move toward Web 3.0, many believe that this new version of the Internet will be decentralized, unchanging, and resistant to web censorship.
Recently, the controversial issue of censorship on major tech platforms culminated when the campaign campaign of US President Donald Trump was blocked due to the publication of incorrect information about the Corona virus on Twitter and Facebook. The debate over who provides what kind of information to the audience is nothing new. As we move toward Web 3.0, many believe that this new version of the Internet will be decentralized, unchanging, and resistant to web censorship.
Decentralized interplanetary file system storage solution, or IPFS, is a peer-to-peer protocol designed to "make the web faster, more secure, and more open." This technology allows users to download web pages and content stored between multiple nodes (instead of the central server). In the current network, if anything changes or is blocked, there is no secure way to access it again. IPFS aims to address such shortcomings.
Security, privacy, scalability, and performance limitations of Web 2.0
As mentioned, because data is currently stored on centralized servers, any entity that has control over the server can access, modify, or delete it. In terms of security and privacy, this is a problem because server control means data control. It can be a legal entity, but it can also be a hacker or a political power. When Turkey decided to ban access to Wikipedia, IPFS technology was used to host a similar version of Wikipedia so that Turkish citizens could still access the site. The Catalan Pirate Party has used it to circumvent filtering by the Supreme Court of Catalonia on websites related to the Catalan independence referendum. A Chinese news source, Matters.news, also used IPFS technology to publish an article to circumvent censorship.
The current Internet Protocol relies on location-based addressing, which identifies data based on its location rather than its content. Even if the same data is available at a closer location, it still takes long distances to reach that data to reach a specific location / address. This lowers the performance of the current web. Such a practice has been satisfactory so far, but only because the average web page size was relatively small - the average web page size has increased from just 2 KB to 2 MB over the first two decades of the Internet. Now, with big data and HD video playback, data production and consumption by people has increased. Scalability is now more important than ever.
Distributed hash table enables efficient access and search of content
Using the distributed Kademlia or DHT hash table, the IPFS P2P file sharing system distributes data between networks of computers that are synchronized for access and search between nodes. This type of data structure is decentralized and will continue to operate reliably even when nodes are down or out of the network. IPFS addresses the file based on content identification instead of location-based addressing. The content identifier is an encrypted hash of the content contained in that address, a unique hash that allows the requested content to be verified (fault-tolerant).
DHT provides a decentralized data structure in which IPFS nodes can find other counterparts and requested content. The fault-tolerant feature means that nodes can operate independently without coordination with a center. This enables the system to support millions of nodes. Needless to say, the ability of such a system to circumvent content censorship is due to its decentralized structure.
The ability of a decentralized market to encourage information storage and retrieval
Now that we know how IPFS technology uses DHT to locate peers (PEER) and content, we need to explain how to request and retrieve content. Blocks of data are exchanged over the IPFS network through its data exchange module called Bitswap. As a message-based protocol, the main role of Bitswap is to find the block of data requested by the client counterpart and send it to the relevant counterpart / counterparts.
Although these tasks are simple, their complexity stems from the actual exchange between peers, where "strategy" is needed to decide when to send and to whom to send. Unlike BitTorrent, where exchanged blocks come from a single torrent (usually a file), in IPFS, peers can receive blocks from almost all of their peers. Using blockchain as a data exchange marketplace, each peer has an internal strategy that they use to make decisions about exchanging content with other participants. These strategies can include incentives, barter, rewarding uptime, punishing downtime, or other approaches.
The developers of IPFS have introduced a blockchain, rewarding uptime, punishing downtime protocol called Filecoin. The idea of ​​Filecoin is to allow anyone with unused hard disk space to use it as a storage space in a decentralized market where prices are determined by supply and demand. This means moving away from centralized cloud storage with fixed pricing such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google Web Services. The network is market-oriented and is designed to add economic incentives to encourage people to participate, strong end-to-end encryption, cryptographic removal, and more. Miners do not compete only in terms of cost. Other factors such as reliability, reliability, data availability, etc. are involved in ensuring the fair operation of the network and improving it. The blockchain protocol relies on proof-of-replication, which is used to prove that data is securely stored and accessible in one place; And proof-of-space-time is used to prove that data is stored over a period of time.
A more robust, efficient, censorship-resistant and robust Internet
These protocols all work together to enable IPFS to form an extensive P2P system for data distribution, storage, and retrieval. Flexibility, efficiency, resistance to censorship and sustainability are the hallmarks of the future Internet model. Its decentralized and fault-tolerant features increase its scalable capacity and support millions of users to participate in the global information network system.