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Comment by anoxic | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea of being able to address content based on it's actual content. Perhaps I don't have a very good imagination, but if all you have is a hash of the content, how to you know where to find it?

From within a single app it's easy, but what about in other apps or other machines. Would there be a (possibly distributed/voluntary) lookup service? Could comments or lookup "hints" be added to the spec?

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This is the secret sauce that makes every implementation unique. Camlistore, IPFS, StrongLink (my project), and others all have different answers. I think the important thing is that they all use hash URIs that can interoperate. Then you can find the content using whichever system you prefer or makes the most sense.

StrongLink doesn't use a distributed hash table, because one of my requirements is that it must work offline. In StrongLink, you pull from other repositories you're interested in, and then always resolve your requests against your own repo (locally).

This is usually achieved using distributed hash tables. Almost certainly the most prominent use of this is magnet links in bittorrent. Freenet has also been doing this for a long time, and ipfs is a relatively new player.

The internals of distributed hash tables are out of scope for a comment thread, but if you happen to know about the structure of the cassandra database, they're related concepts.

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