Ipfs and distributed peer review

In the abstract, what you’re building is a centralized registry of metadata about decentralized content, where the review and the metadata about the review are all metadata about a hash and in this case the hash is the identifier for some publication stored on IPFS.

Some things to ponder:

  • If you add the text of the review, and the metadata about the review, to IPFS then you get to treat that bundle of data as just more IPFS content
  • If you use IPLD to express the metadata you will get powerful benefits
  • If you persist the data in a distributed way using, for example, ipfs pubsub or a blockchain, then your entire peer review system would be distributed and serverless. except…
  • If you do all of those things then your only remaining point of centralization is the authentication tool – in this case you’re using github – and you could consider using something like uport or keybase to decentralize even that.
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