Papers to read to understand IPFS

This repo is for listing papers that are useful for understanding IPFS, whether it be understanding the IPFS spec itself, or the background for the decentralized web, protocols, hashing, and so on.

• Baumgart, Ingmar and Mies, Sebastian (2007) S/Kademlia: A Practicable Approach Towards Secure Key-Based Routing
• Benet, Juan (2014) IPFS - Content Addressed, Versioned, P2P File System.
• Freedman, Michael J., Freudenthal, Eric and Mazières, David (2004) Democratizing Content Publication with Coral
• Mazières, David and Kaashoek, M. Frans (1998) Escaping the Evils of Centralized Control with self-certifying pathnames
• Mazières, David and Maymounkov, Petar (2002) Kademlia: A Peer-to-peer Information System Based on the XOR Metric

• The Coral project keeps a publications list

PRs accepted! Please open an issue if you would like to discuss adding a paper you think is relevant, or open a PR to add the paper directly.

For papers which the IPFS community has written that cite IPFS, discuss it, or describe projects that use it, please see ipfs/papers. We can also link those here; if you see one that isn't mentioned above, please open a pull request.

Please title your PR after the name of the paper. For instance: Benet - IPFS - Content Addressed, Versioned, P2P File System.

To stop a lot of bike shedding, papers should be added in BibTex format in the papers.bib file, as well as in this README in the list above. Please provide all of the information you can in the bib files. The title in this README can link to the paper.

A note about access: We will not accept PDFs in this repository, although we do accept links to papers. Preferably, these would be in the form of IPFS hashes. Do not upload or link closed-access papers: however, please feel free to link to papers which are open-access. If a file is closed-access, but is linkable elsewhere in an open-access setting (ie, for free on the author's website), please link to the open access paper. We will maintain this as stringently as we can. If you are in doubt, discuss it in the issue or PR.

If you have other questions, feel free to open an issue about them, too.

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