Why The Internet Needs IPFS Before It’s Too Late | TechCrunch

Why The Internet Needs IPFS Before It’s Too Late | TechCrunch

Many are excited by its potential to greatly improve file transfer and streaming speeds across the Internet.

From my personal perspective, however, it’s actually much more important than that. IPFS eliminates the need for websites to have a central origin server, making it perhaps our best chance to entirely re-architect the Internet — before its own internal contradictions unravel it from within.

How, and why? The answer requires a bit of background....

Why We Have A Slow, Fragile And Forgetful Web

IPFS is a new peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol that aims to supplement, or possibly even replace, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol that rules the web now. Here’s the problem with HTTP: When you go to a website today, your browser has to be directly connected to the computers that are serving that website, even if their servers are far away and the transfer process eats up a lot of bandwidth.

Data providers get charged because each network has a peering agreement, while each network hop costs money to the data provider and wastes bandwidth. Worse, HTTP downloads a file from a single computer at a time, instead of getting pieces from multiple computers simultaneously.

Consequently, we have what we’re stuck with now: a slow, expensive Internet, made even more costly by predatory last-mile carriers (in the U.S. at least), and the accelerating growth of connection requests from mobile devices. It’s not just slow and expensive, it’s unreliable. If one link in an HTTP transfer cuts out for whatever reason, the whole transfer breaks. (Whenever a web page or media file is slow to load, a problem with a link in the HTTP chain is among the likeliest culprits.) ...

...Netflix recently started researching large-scale peer-to-peer technology for streaming, an early, hopeful sign that companies of its size and reach are looking for smarter content distribution methods. Netflix, YouTube, all the bandwidth-heavy services we cherish now would thrive on an Internet remade by IPFS, dramatically reducing the cost and time to serve content....