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IPFS is basically BitTorrent if all the torrents could share with each other. IPFS is as if each "torrent" is a single chunk of data instead of a siloed collection of stuff.

IPFS expands BitTorrent into a global filesystem.

You can mount IPFS on your filesystem and address files by pointing at local resources on your machine. So you could have an HTML file say `<img src="/ipfs/QmCoolPic" />`. You can't do that with BitTorrent.



Okay, but it's not 2001 anymore. Bittorrent was useful because parallelizing uploads across a broad network increased speed to a degree that content hosts couldn't manage.

But that's not true anymore, most internet power-users are on broadband connections, many of which are symmetric, transfer speeds up or down are no longer a limiter that pushes people towards decentralization.

So when considering a decentralized system like IPFS, the downsides of decentralization, like availability, edit control, and service support, are much more salient.

There are a lot of things that "could work if everybody uses it". You can never get there if the thing isn't desirable compared to existing alternatives.


BitTorrent v2 shares dedups chunks between torrents as a side affect of changes to the hashing algorithm.




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