Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomim | Hacker News Reader

And works great until your content changes, and then the address changes, and you end up wanting to have a way to name and address your content across the changes, and then you aren't using content addressing anymore.

View on HN

Just use a public key as your address, and make signed pointers to the actual content. That's how people have been solving the update problem for ages.

Naming things continues to be one of the hard problems in computer science.

Then it's no longer content-addressing. It's now "public key plus a signed pointer referencing a name-that-has-yet-to-be-specified" addressing.

I think that's a fine road to go down for addressing data, but it's not content addressing.

Why not? If you include the public key with the signed pointer, then you can define a "hash" function that returns just the pubkey (yes with collisions, but not in a way that matters) and it is content-addressing. After all, you are literally addressing by content in this scheme.

What is actually the difference in any way that matters? What property does content addressing have that this doesn't.

I mean a content hash that redirects if it is deprecated?

And that's exactly what IPNS does. You can also use DNS with DNSLink.

Its what everyone does. The technique predates ipfs and friends by a long time.

Well, to me those sounds like different use cases. Pointing to the current up do date content requires a domain anyway. The domain is the users guarantee that a trusted party has made the decision to update the content.

An end-user doesn't want to manually update a domain each time they update their site. That's practically a non-starter for the technology. Especially since domain updates require transactions (on a L1 or L2 chain) to complete.

As mentioned by another person, IPNS does solve this issue, though. My domains are pointed to an IPFS+IPNS-published version of my site, which is re-published on change from Github.

Is IPNS still in fathomably slow?

Not if you use PubSub

I thought IPFS did both; default content-addressing but with IPNS to allow mutability if desired, which means you can use whatever works the best. Did I misunderstand that?

No, that's correct. I'm not sure why the parent post ignored the ipns.

Because it's no-longer content addressing: if you are addressing your content by a name, to allow it to mutate, then you aren't addressing it by its content. You're addressing it by a name.

And not to beat a dead horse, but IPNS doesn't work very well. These days people tend to build their own naming systems using layers of IPLD hashes instead.

You're still using content addressing. Any mirrors made stay the same. Any changes are preserved as new versions. All versions are still accessible by their hashes.

The fact that you have some extra names on top of that doesn't change the base system.

Those features are not what defines content addressing. Content addressing is defined as an address for a document that is a function of its content.

If your address is a function of a public key, then you're using "agent key addressing."

It works great even in that case, at the fundamental level it makes sense for content to be accessed in such a manner and then indexed on too of that by name.

the metadata can be versioned and you can lookup by version, so names of stored file can be changed but every time there is a change to any of the metadata the version is updated too

Reply on news.ycombinator.com