IPFS Puzzle

Hello there! Let me explain to you what IPFS is in the simplest way possible.

Imagine you have a toy that you want to share with your friend who lives far away from you. Instead of sending the toy through the mail, you make a copy of the toy and send the copy to your friend. Your friend can now play with the toy, but it's not the original toy that you had.

Now let's say you have a file on your computer that you want to share with someone else. You could send the file through email or a messaging app, but what if the file is too big to send that way? This is where IPFS comes in.

IPFS stands for Inter Planetary File System. It's like a giant library where you can store and share files with anyone in the world. But instead of making copies of the files, IPFS breaks them up into small pieces and stores them on different computers all over the world. This way, the files are always available, even if one of the computers goes offline.

When you want to share a file with someone, you don't actually send the whole file to them. Instead, you send them a link to the file on IPFS. When they click on the link, their computer fetches the small pieces of the file from all the different computers where they are stored, and puts them back together into the complete file.

Think of it like a puzzle. Each piece of the file is like a puzzle piece, and IPFS is like the person who puts all the pieces together to make the final picture.

So, in summary, IPFS is a way to store and share files without having to make copies of them. It breaks up files into small pieces and stores them on different computers all over the world, making them always available. When you want to share a file, you send a link to the file on IPFS, and the pieces of the file are put back together to make the complete file.

IPFS uses cryptography to ensure that your files are secure and private.

When a file is added to IPFS, it's broken up into small pieces called "blocks". Each block is given a unique identifier called a "hash". This hash is like a digital fingerprint that represents the contents of the block. The hash is used to verify that the block hasn't been tampered with or corrupted.

IPFS uses a technique called "content addressing" to store and retrieve files. When you want to retrieve a file from IPFS, you use the hash of the file to request it from the network. The network then looks for all the blocks that make up the file and sends them back to you.

Since the blocks are stored on different computers all over the world, it's very difficult for anyone to tamper with the file without being detected. If someone tries to change a block, the hash of that block would change as well, which would alert the network that something is wrong.

In addition to content addressing, IPFS also supports encryption to provide an extra layer of security. You can encrypt your files before adding them to IPFS, so that only people who have the encryption key can access them. This means that even if someone intercepts the blocks of your file, they won't be able to read the contents without the key.

So IPFS nodes don't have access to the unencrypted contents of your files. They only have access to the encrypted blocks, which they store and distribute on behalf of the network. This makes IPFS a very secure way to store and share files over the internet.