Few days ago I wanted to buy a dress and asked two of my friends where I could get the dress.

Friend 1: Ohh!! So you need to go to Pune Tulshi Bag Shop No. 103. Go to the 2nd floor of the shop. In the second section you will get the same dress.

Friend 2: First check on Mintra for the dress. If not found you will surely get the same dress in the shop next to our street.

What's the difference between these two suggestions?

First one is stating that go to the specific address to get dress. Now the point comes their are few possibilities that I will not get the dress.

Like what if the shop is closed? What if I didn't find the dress in the shop? What if the address specified has a different dress than the one I asked for?

Here comes the concept of location based addressing.

What happens when you click on any URL-Uniform Resource Locator on the web?

Whenever we click on any URL on the web the resource request is made to the central server located somewhere in the world for getting the resource.

This is how the traditional centralized web works.

Second one is stating that you check for multiple options available for the dress. Here we can simply get the concept of decentralized systems. That rather than only one shop multiple shops can have the same resource. Which increases the chances that I can get the dress. Our focus is on getting a dress not from where we are going to get it.

Which introduces content based addressing :

Using content itself as the identifier to get any resource. Content Identifier (CID) is used in decentralized systems to get the required resource.

Now comparing both Location Based Addressing and Content Based Addressing :

Location Based Addressing has many of it's advantages as we are using it right now to get anything online but some of its drawbacks over Content Based Addressing are:

Availability : If the central server fails no-one is going to get any required resource in the case of location based addressing. Opposite to this if we are using content based addressing resource is stored decentralized and searched by resource id (CID) so if any node in decentralized network has the resource we can get it.

Security : We can't guarantee the resource we asked for and the resource we are getting are always the same i.e. if we asked for a rose we can't guarantee that we got is rose. In content based addressing the content that is rose itself is used for addressing and is hashed and the hash value used for comparing the resource is exactly what we asked.

Redundancy : Redundant data gets stored many times (e.g. when we download the same file twice it creates file, file(1)). Which does not happen in content based addressing as content is the same it will generate the same hash value so will get stored only once.

~Sanskriti LinkedIn Twitter