From @Peeja on Wed Nov 11 2015 01:35:46 GMT+0000 (UTC)
> can you explain what you mean there? what is HTTP doing here that is different from just moving documents?
In HTTP, there is a request; in IPFS, there isn’t. HTTP is a “pull” technology; IPFS is…well, it’s not pulling and it’s not pushing. It’s…rendezvousing?
In HTTP, we often have to create an entity for a particular user. The entity is specific to that user—a timeline of statuses of other users they follow, for instance—and we know which user to build the entity for because of (usually) a cookie header in the request. The user-specific entity is created on demand.
In the IPFS model (naively, at least), the application would have to generate these entities in advance and make them available to the network, presumably encrypted with the public keys of the users for which they’re intended.
HTTP offers an API of function calls to its clients. IPFS offers a data structure. Fetching data from the IPFS network can’t trigger the process that will create that data; the data must already exist.