Overview of Protocol Labs, IPFS, libp2p, IPLD, and Filecoin

Hey again!

We're having a meetup outside of the the regular Tuesday time slot, but trust me there's a good reason for this! We're having Jesse Clayburgh from Protocol Labs coming to present.

Since it's on a Saturday, if anybody wants to grab beers afterwards let me know. It's socially acceptable, unlike on Tuesdays :)

// -- Talk Description -- //

The internet and the web have serious problems: our data is held hostage in data silos, web applications disappear on short notice destroying functionality, link rot takes down websites and entire collections of valuable data, censorship prevents digital Freedom of Speech and digital Freedom of Association, the openness and "permissionlessness" are fading, the security models fail to authenticate and encrypt data end-to-end and at rest, the end-to-end principle has been broken several times, there is little support for offline or disconnected use cases, which affects people living with poor networks the worst, and -- last but not least -- sometimes content distribution is just horribly inefficient.

The Protocol Labs (https://protocol.ai/) team has been working on solutions to the problems above. Our most popular protocol so far -- The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) (https://ipfs.io/) -- is a decentralized web protocol based on content-addressing, digital signatures, and peer-to-peer distribution. Today, IPFS is used to build completely distributed (and offline-capable!) web-apps, save and distribute valuable datasets, and move billions of files. IPFS spawned several other projects, for example:

• libp2p -- a modular network stack to make writing peer-to peer systems easy (https://libp2p.io/).
• IPLD -- a model for hash-linked-data and distributed authenticated computation (https://ipld.io/).
• And our upcoming project, Filecoin (https://filecoin.io/), a Decentralized Storage Network (powered by Useful Storage Consensus and markets)

In this talk Jesse from Protocol Labs will give an overview of the stack of protocols, the main abstractions, and how they fit together. We'll also discuss how we do what we do: large scale open source projects, with huge world-wide communities and users, and supported by Protocol Labs -- a new Research, Development, and Deployment lab for networks.