design
concepts
Concepts
IPFS intrduces a number of new terms & techniques. We outline some of the more prominent ones here for reference.
Content IDentifier (CID)
Content IDentifiers look like this:
bafybeihjgu5w6wbbxqevdgccj5xm453dbzpkwmkyoepvs3vh6wft4uvf2q
A CID contains the hash of it's contents, which is: the result of running the content through a hash function. The CID for different things will always be a different set of characters. Once content is in IPFS, we refer to it by the CID. A great tool for learning about CIDs is the CID inspector. Iroh only produces CIDs that use the BLAKE3 hashing function.