Help us Decentralize the Web! Overview of IPFS, libp2p, IPLD, and Filecoin.

Speaker

Juan Benet
Protocol Labs

Host

Lalana Kagal and Tim Berners-Lee
Decentralized Information Group
TL;DR: There's many problems with the internet and the web. Come hear about the open source p2p systems we're building to fix them, and join us!

talk from 3-4
breakout from 4-5

The internet and the web have serious problems: our data is held hostage in data silos, web applications disappear on short notice destroying functionality, link rot takes down websites and entire collections of valuable data, censorship prevents digital Freedom of Speech and digital Freedom of Association, the openness and "permissionlessness" are fading, the security models fail to authenticate and encrypt data end-to-end and at rest, the end-to-end principle has been broken several times, there is little support for offline or disconnected use cases, which affects people living with poor networks the worst, and -- last but not least -- sometimes content distribution is just horribly inefficient.

The Protocol Labs team has been working on solutions to the problems above. Our most popular protocol so far -- The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) -- is a decentralized web protocol based on content-addressing, digital signatures, and peer-to-peer distribution. Today, IPFS is used to build completely distributed (and offline-capable!) web-apps, save and distribute valuable datasets, and move billions of files. IPFS spawned several other projects, for example:

- libp2p -- a modular network stack to make writing peer-to peer systems easy.
- IPLD, a model for hash-linked-data and distributed authenticated computation.
- And our upcoming project, Filecoin, a Decentralized Storage Network (powered by Useful Storage Consensus and markets)

The talk will be an overview of the stack of protocols, the main abstractions, and how they fit together. We'll go into design decisions in building large scale distributed systems like these, and some of our learnings. We'll also discuss how we do what we do: large scale open source projects, with huge
world-wide communities and users, and supported by Protocol Labs -- a new Research, Development, and Deployment lab for networks. After the talk we'll stick around and can talk about any of these projects with anybody interested in learning more or collaborating with us.

If you are interested in finding out more before the talk, check out these links:
- https://ipfs.io
- https://filecoin.io
- https://libp2p.io
- https://ipld.io
- https://protocol.ai
- https://filecoin.io/filecoin.pdf
- (all hosted transparently through IPFS :)