Hacker News Reader

That's quite literally how bittorrent with DHT works. To download a public torrent you only need its content hash, the metadata and peers are then fetched via DHT assuming at least one reachable DHT node is aware of the torrent.

That is exactly how bittorrent works as well tho. Bittorrent hasn't needed any trackers for public torrents since 2005 and can work solely off magnet links using the DHT network. Just like how IPFS does it.

the difference is, when you have a lot of (small) files. With ipfs you have one global peer pool, with torrents you need a pool per file.

That's basically the same as torrents with magnet links.

As other commenters pointed out, the biggest real difference is that IPFS objects can cross-reference each other by hash, which allows you to do partial updates.

An “update” means a new CID though, and this basically works like a persistent data structure [0]?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_data_structure

Winny (since 2002) and successor Japanese P2P network were like that. They use MD5/SHA file hash as address. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winny