It’s a long story: What is the application significance of IPFS?

The application significance of IPFS can be explained from four aspects.

First, it can bring a certain degree of freedom to content creation.

Akasha is a typical application, a social blog creation platform based on Ethereum and IPFS. The blog content created by users is published through an IPFS network rather than a central server.

At the same time, users are bound to Ethereum wallet accounts, and can give ETH rewards to high-quality content. Content creators can earn ETH from this, just like human brain mining.

It does not have too many regulatory restrictions, nor does it take commissions from middlemen; all revenue from the content goes directly to the creators.

Second, it can reduce storage and bandwidth costs.

Dtube is a decentralized video playback platform built on Steemit. The video files uploaded by its users are stored through the IPFS protocol and have unique identifiers.

Compared with traditional video websites, it reduces the redundancy of resources and greatly saves the bandwidth costs incurred by massive users when playing videos.

Third, it can be perfectly integrated with blockchain.

The essence of blockchain is a distributed ledger. One of its bottlenecks is the storage capacity of the ledger. Currently, the biggest problem of most public chains is that they cannot store large amounts of hypermedia data on their own chains.

The total block data of Bitcoin to date is only about 30-40G. Programmable blockchain projects such as Ethereum can only execute and store small pieces of contract code. DApp's desire to develop into a super App is greatly restricted.

Using IPFS technology to solve storage bottlenecks is currently a transitional solution, and the most typical application is EOS.

EOS is proud of its ability to support a concurrent volume of millions of TPS. In addition to the DPOS consensus mechanism, this is also due to its underlying storage design that uses IPFS to solve the transmission efficiency of large data.

EOS processes its packaged block data heterogeneously through IPLD, unifies it into a data structure type that is easy to address content, and mounts it on the IPFS link, allowing the IPFS network to take on the logic of storage and P2P retrieval without consuming too many computing resources of the EOS blockchain system itself.

Fourth, it can provide distributed caching solutions for traditional applications.

IPFS-GEO is a project that provides distributed caching for traditional LBS applications. It can convert geographic location coordinate data into a one-dimensional string through the GeoHash algorithm, and store the associated data with retrieval value into the IPFS network. The IPFS network identifies the uniqueness and distributes it on each neighboring node.

When a search request arrives, the system first compares the string similarity range to narrow the search scope and speed up the search efficiency. It then obtains hypermedia data from nearby nodes through NodeID to achieve an effect similar to distributed caching, greatly improving the efficiency of the entire search action of the LBS application.

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