Next Generation Data Networks: BitTorrent Meets Content Addressing

Speaker: Florian Tschorsch, TU Berlin & Einstein Center Digital Future

While the trend of decentralization is not new, the topic gained traction due to technological advancements, most notably content addressing and blockchain networks. As a consequence, we observe that a new generation of peer-to-peer data networks emerges. They offer a distributed file system for data storage and sharing. In this lecture, we provide an introduction to this field in general and identify the building blocks that shaped the development in particular. To this end, we will use the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) as an example and see how it consolidates these building blocks.