What are the differences between IPFS and hyperdrive?

Question

A year ago, I attended a meeting in Munich, where I first saw the live hyperdrive project and found it impressive. I also recently attacked IPFS - the interplanetary file system - and I'm curious about the differences. It’s easy to have a lot of repertoire when starting such a project in California, so I think they can be similar projects, but still do not fully understand the size of the hyperdrive.

I really like the API and hyperdrive implementation, so if I needed to create an application on top of a distributed file system, I think that it would be easier for me to choose this project at this moment.

Are there any or some bold bullet points that I could use for comparison?

thanks

Answer 1

Some specific differences between IPFS and hyperdrive, considering how file sharing and file directories are shared between peers in a distributed manner, are as follows:

• IPFS has a global namespace (a given piece or file with a specific hash can be used or accessed in any context), while hyperdrive files and fragments are attached to separate disks. This is a bit of a generalization, but by default, a file displayed in multiple hyper drives will be downloaded over the network for each drive.
• The connection to the IPFS network is usually permanent (for example, with the local daemon the applications are working with, instead of talking directly to the network). There is no single data transfer network or hyperdrive, but only single-user swarms interested in specific drives; hyperdrive applications typically detect and connect to peers on their own.
• Detection and reference to hyperdrives are based on public key encryption (a key pair created by the creator), while IPFS uses content hashing (which, theoretically, does not matter who added this file or fragment to the network)
• The IPFS implementation of the Merkel tree does a better job of de-duplication between slightly modified copies of the same file. Hyperdrive files are stored as separate contiguous fragments; even a small addition to an existing file requires re-writing the same file to the feed. It is possible for hyperdrive to evolve to deal with this deduplication in the future.

Subjective observations:

• The hyperdrive current tool for efficiently synchronizing entire file directories between multiple peers is more polished (this is the main use case for a hyper drive and one of many use cases for IPFS).
• As of March 2018, there is a convenient web browser with built-in support for hyperdrive (Beaker Browser), and not for IPFS. Browser support for IPFS is likely to appear next year, but probably will not be so rooted for launch (for example, it will start by reading only).
• Major IPFS libraries and tools have been ported to more languages ​​and seen more reviews and developments than hyperdrive.

Answer 2

I think these are more or less comparable technologies. Both of them can be used to create decentralized software solutions.

Hyperdrive is part of a larger ecosystem of interoperability modules. This is part of file processing and relies on hypercore . But a comprehensive initiative is the nonprofit Dat Project . See also dat-awesome for an overview of technology and its various components.

The FAQ has a section:

Dat vs?

Dat has many overlaps with other distributed web tools, data management tools, and distributed version control. Below are some of the most common questions. See Detailed technical comparisons in Dat whitepaper for more details .

In general, you could say that Dat, with its ecosystem, is more focused on application design, while IPFS is a common protocol + implementation for file sharing.

There are no standards in the field of decentralized computing. This is truly an unfinished niche in IT. I would say about two technologies in which IPFS currently has the highest changes, becoming the de facto standard. But Dat is gaining momentum and has a very active community (but a little difficult to understand due to some fragmentation of all involved github replicas, such as hyperdrive). For an interesting discussion of this subject, you should read this discussion topic .

In the blockchain, I can only say: be careful and do your homework, otherwise do not be aloof!

I hope this will be useful to you!

BTW I removed the tag 'blockchain' because it is not connected, although any blockchain application may decide to enable IPFS (or Dat, for that matter). There is a repo discussion for IPFS + Blockchain, but it is not very active