Decentralized Resource Interface

[State: concept]

TLDR; A command line tool and library to load entities from decentralized addresses. Similar to libcurl/curl on the command line.

Background

Over the past years there have been several protocols implemented to share data using decentralized systems. IPFS and the Hypercore-protocol have become popular but probably more prominently the W3C's Decentralized Identity Document specification a variety of protocols like sidetree (using ethereum and IPFS) or lorena.

However there is no unify util to interact with the did resource files, like there are tools to interact with web content such as curl or fetch. The Agregore browser works on providing a web interface for this and has been working on providing a fetch-compatible API for hyper and ipfs but it hasn't come to the point where it offers the functionality for a general audience.

A library and a command line tool

What we propose to build is a JavaScript library similar to fetch that accepts these new lookups:

const fetch = require('decentralized-fetch')

const data = await Promise.all([

fetch('did:key:zQ3shU9mxTYfMTLceuppoNM5siowHvw3xBk21r855kwgNHNAX'),

fetch('hyper://515bbbc1db2139ef27b6c45dfa418c8be6a1dec16823ea7cb9e61af8d060049e/file.txt')

])

Which will load the relevant underlying protocols automatically. Parallel there should also be a command line tool works much like curl to download and upload files to decentralized systems:

$ decentralized-fetch did:key:zQ3shU9mxTYfMTLceuppoNM5siowHvw3xBk21r855kwgNHNAX

Relevancy & Beneficiaries

Having unified tools both highlight the power of various projects in the decentralized space and make it easier to build new applications and platforms on top of them.

Why JavaScript

Many decentralized projects provide go-lang or c implementations of their work but all provide JavaScript implementations which makes JavaScript the best and probably only choice for the beginning.