InterPlanetary File System

InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a decentralized filesystem. IPFS uses Distributed Hash Table (DHT) and Merkle Direct Acyclic Graph (DAG) data structures. It uses a protocol similar to Torrent to decide how to move the data around the network. One of the advanced features of IPFS is that it supports file versioning. To achieve file versioning, it uses data structures similar to Git.

Although it's called as a decentralized filesystem, it doesn't adhere to a major property of a filesystem, namely, when we store something in filesystem, it should be there until deleted. But, IPFS doesn't work this way. Each node doesn't store all files, instead it stores only those files it needs. Therefore, if a file is not popular, then many nodes will not have the file therefore there is a huge chance of the file disappearing in the network. Due to this, we can call IPFS a decentralised peer-to-peer file-sharing application. We will learn about about how it works in later chapters.