How IPFS Works in Under 5 Minutes

This video will provide an overview of what IPFS (Interplanetary File System) is and how it works along with details on how this protocol differs from legacy file storage mechanisms.

Outline
What is IPFS 0:00 - 0:50
CID 0:50 - 1:05
Cloudflare 1:05 - 1:20
Hosting 1:20 - 2:02
Caching 2:02 - 3:00
Protocol 3:00 - 3:30
Costs 3:30 - 3:40
Protocol Labs 3:40 - 4:00
LightHouse Storage 4:00 - 4:25
Filecoin 4:25 - 4:57

https://web3.storage/
Both services are offered by the same group and share much of the same architecture, but as the name suggests, NFT.Storage is a service that is focused on NFTs specifically, with the mission to perpetually store all off-chain NFT data as a public good (so for free, forever). On the other hand, Web3.Storage looks to offer very inexpensive, decentralized data storage for any kind of data.

IPFS
A peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol
designed to preserve and grow humanity's knowledge
by making the web upgradeable, resilient, and more open.

When you add a file to IPFS, your file is split into smaller chunks, cryptographically hashed, and given a unique fingerprint called a content identifier (CID). This CID acts as a permanent record of your file as it exists at that point in time.

When other nodes look up your file, they ask their peer nodes who's storing the content referenced by the file's CID. When they view or download your file, they cache a copy — and become another provider of your content until their cache is cleared.

A node can pin content in order to keep (and provide) it forever, or discard content it hasn't used in a while to save space. This means each node in the network stores only content it is interested in, plus some indexing information that helps figure out which node is storing what.

If you add a new version of your file to IPFS, its cryptographic hash is different, and so it gets a new CID. This means files stored on IPFS are resistant to tampering and censorship — any changes to a file don't overwrite the original, and common chunks across files can be reused in order to minimize storage costs.

However, this doesn't mean you need to remember a long string of CIDs — IPFS can find the latest version of your file using the IPNS decentralized naming system, and DNSLink can be used to map CIDs to human-readable DNS names.

Lighthouse

Pay once and store forever
 Lighthouse runs a storage endowment pool whose job is to pay for the user files till perpetuity. This is of utmost priority for many applications, for example, NFT where many users are unaware of the fact that somebody has to pay for their NFTs over time which is generally a centralized mechanism and otherwise might lead to a broken NFT.

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