WebMingle CIDs

WebMingle makes its free, decentralized file storage work using CIDs with the help of IPFS and Filecoin for locating files and ensuring they are always available.

Content addressing is the basis of the peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol IPFS (Interplanetary File System), which WebMingle uses to locate files. When WebMingle stores your data on IPFS, it can be retrieved from any IPFS node that has a copy of that data. This can make data transfer more efficient and reduce the load on any single node. When each user gets a piece of data, they keep a local copy to help other users who might request it later.

In addition to making it easy for WebMingle to import your data into the content-addressed IPFS network, it uses the decentralized Filecoin storage network to provide long-term persistence for your files. The Filecoin network incentivizes participants to provide storage space for files on the network - see the Decentralized Storage Concepts Guide for more details. By combining IPFS and Filecoin storage into one easy-to-use service, WebMingle makes it simple to store, locate, and retrieve files on a decentralized network.

Using content addressing to locate files, rather than the traditional Web's location-dependent addressing methods, addresses several key weaknesses of the traditional Web:

Content addressing solves the problem behind link failure - variability in location-dependent storage systems - by using a hashing algorithm to generate a unique CID for each file that can be used as a lookup key for the file rather than the URL.

In addition to ensuring that files are not lost when moved, content addressing ensures that users who intend to retrieve a particular version of a file are guaranteed to retrieve that version as long as it exists anywhere on the network.