- Aug 2022
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subconscious.substack.com subconscious.substack.com
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Content addressing is the big little idea behind IPFS. With content addressing (CIDs), you ask for a file using a hash of its contents. It doesn't matter where the file lives. Anyone in the network can serve that content. This is analogous to the leap Baran made from circuit switching to packet switching. Servers become fungible, going from K-selected to r-selected.
Content addressing is when a piece of content has its own permanent address, a URI. Many copies may exist of the content, hosted by many in the network, all copies have the same address. Whoever is best situated to serve you a copy, does so. It makes the servers interchangeable. My blogposts have a canonical fixed address, but it's tied to a specific domain and only found on 1 server (except when using a CDN).
IPFS starts from content addressing.
Content addressing, assuming the intention 'protocol for thought' here, does match with atomic notes type of pkm systems. All my notes have unique names that could as human readable names map to CIDs. CIDs do change when the content changes, so there's a mismatch with the concept of 'permanent notes' that are permanent in name/location yet have slowly evolving content.
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