Over the past few decades, most of us have benefited greatly from the dramatic changes that the Internet has brought to our lives. We are now accustomed to constant access to information, virtual communities through social media, and the convenience offered by e-commerce sites. And all of this is achieved through the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which was introduced in 1989 to facilitate the sharing of information among researchers at the European Commission for Nuclear Research (CERN).

But online content has evolved a lot since the early days of Web 1.0. Back then, web pages were mostly static, with little user-generated content or interactive information involved. As the Internet moves towards Web 2.0, the landscape begins to shift towards a focus on interoperability and a participatory culture that can be generated from large numbers of users on Wikipedia, blogs, video and image sharing sites, social media platforms It is reflected in the content and meets the needs of streaming media services. But the advent of these bandwidth-intensive hypermedia, and the potentially massive influx of data from IoT, is gradually putting pressure on the internet, prompting some to seek alternatives.

IPFS: "A Faster, More Secure, More Open Web"

A promising candidate for building the next-generation web, Web3.o, is the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), a relatively new hypermedia protocol and decentralized data storage system that uses a peer-to-peer (p2p) network architecture.

The sci-fi name of IPFS is an affirmation of American computer scientist JCR Licklider's thinking about "galactic computer networks" in the 1960s. IPFS was first developed in 2014 by Juan Benet, an American computer scientist and founder of Protocol Labs, to solve some of the shortcomings of HTTP. Bennett aims to create something that could eventually become a "new subsystem of the internet," while also taking into account new developments such as the distributed ledger technology that underpins blockchains.

Mikeal Rogers, engineering manager of Protocol Labs, explained, "IPFS is a decentralized data network, and anyone in the world can provide data in the network, and can safely receive data from them or anyone else." . IPFS was, and still is, developed as a data transfer protocol for Web 3.0. Since the protocol is fully decentralized and all data is hashed, it is ideal for blockchain applications that need to process large amounts of data that cannot be embedded in the chain itself. "

The decentralized model based on IPFS is in stark contrast to the client-server model running HTTP. Originally designed to transfer information between web browsers and web servers, HTTP is based on location addressing, allowing users to access data stored on centralized servers. While this simplifies the management and distribution of data, it is not efficient. This is because when you click on a website, your web browser must connect directly to the server hosting that website. For memory-heavy audio and video files, it can be bandwidth-intensive and even quite expensive, especially if the origin server is located far away. Browsing or downloading popular content can also cause network congestion. HTTP also has potential privacy and security issues: Anyone in control of the server could access or change the data, or the network could become inaccessible due to distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks by hackers.

In contrast, IPFS is based on content addressing, so that the content can be verified and separated from the remote server, and the content is stored closer to the user. It can do this by using content identifiers (CIDs), or "tags," which are used in IPFS to point to material. The CID is generated based on a cryptographic hash of the content.

Rogers said: "When you put data into IPFS, it can be obtained through a hash address or CID, and anyone in the world can enter this address into their computer and retrieve the data. Just like anyone in the world In the same way that a URL link can be put into a browser and retrieved, anyone with a CID can retrieve data available in the IPFS network.”

Any difference in content will result in a different CID, while the same content added to different IPFS nodes will still result in the same CID, which means users can easily verify the integrity of the data. In addition to providing decentralized content storage and verification, IPFS can also be used to build and host decentralized applications (DApps), which are open source computer applications whose backend code runs on a peer-to-peer network.

Rogers added, "With a CID, the hash of the data you're looking for is in the address, so you can get the data from anywhere, because you can verify that the data is correct by comparing the hashes, and it allows you to have a Decentralized, trustless web, because you can retrieve data from anywhere or anyone, and it's cryptographically verified that it's correct."