[anderspitman]

When I first learned about content addressing a couple years ago, it sounded like the holy grail. I'm less certain now. It seems much better from the machine perspective, but I'm not sure it matches closely enough the way humans interact with data. We are spatial and temporal creatures. There's something unsettling about my video file being chopped up into a million chunks and stored who-knows-where. Compared to the path/URL approach where I have a single large file. I know where it lives and how big it is. Moving/copying/deleting/updating/etc are all intuitive and map to analogs in the physical world. Content addressing (and object storage system I might add) isn't as easy to reason about.

Don't get me wrong. Content addressing is very cool, and may revolutionize everything. It's very elegant. I'm just a bit skeptical.

[ithkuil]

Technically content addressing and chunking (chopping up files) are two orthogonal techniques. You could envision a system where the hash of a single raw file (no matter how big it is) is it's identifier, and you can then have a mapping between that identifier and the locations (e.g. IP addresses) of servers who store the whole file.

[anderspitman]

You are of course correct. I was implying current content-addressing systems, such as IPFS.