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It's a lot like BitTorrent - everything is identified by its hash.

Many of the claimed advantages of IPFS can be achieved with subresource integrity. If you use subresource integrity, files are validated by their hash. We just need some convention by which the hash is encoded into the URL. Then any caching server in the path can safely fulfill the request.

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(IPFS dev here) I think subresource integrity is an _awesome_ thing that needs to be implemented and spread all over asap. (Actually, if you work on this, please ping us! we'd love to help!)

However, this is very far from "many of the claimed advantages". I think it covers a few, but take a look at all the other stuff we can do, like making offline/disconnected webapps work! Think of IPFS like git or bitcoin, not just bittorrent.

This isn't really a valid criticism of IPFS, unless you can point to a competing initiative which implements 'subresource integrity'. Alan Kay said that each object on a webpage should have its own URI way back in 1997, and yet here we are.

(IPFS dev) Yes! One of my explicit goals is to help get to Alan Kay's "one address for each object" goal.

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