A Coder’s Diary 4 (How I finally got IPFS working)

Wednesday, March 6, 2019

Dear Diary,

I always knew that humility is indispensable when working in IT, most of all if you are a programmer. You never know enough, and if you think you know enough, you are most certainly wrong.

This morning I told you how I have set up IPFS — and how I failed. Now this should have been the right moment to have intuition jump in. Intuition — and I also tend to forget that — is the second most important virtue when working in IT. But more than often I do not trust my intuition. Today it would have told me that there is some environmental issue involved in my experiments with IPFS. The firewall got in the way!

Now the “magic triangle” has finally become visible:

I am getting a little bit more optimistic towards IPFS now: The whole concept basically works! The first (and maybe biggest) challenge is usually to get the stuff up and running in the old and rusty infrastructure. Here you still have to get your hands dirty!

But what happens if you have come beyond this point? Is the bright and shiny future of peer-to-peer-networking already in sight? — There might be some youthfulness and naivety needed to go one step further.

What I do like about that work (besides the hardships involved) is the creativity that can also come along. One is simply getting new and unforeseen opportunities, that open up new ways, that nobody has seen before.

So, what is next? What I am missing in IPFS is encryption. Also there should be a standardized way to register hashes in a blockchain. These topics are excluded on purpose, I guess, because it would distract those people too much, who need to get the basics done.

In the end it is basic technology and nothing else. It will remain under the hood forever. Only some experts will get in touch with it. So, in order to change the world, we have to find our first killer application based on IPFS.

What could that be?