The new iroh-blobs design restores the initial “one unique identifier for each file” ethos of IPFS (abandonned by IPFS), to reduce swarm fragmentation. It takes the standard Blake3 hashing algorithm to generate file CIDs (equivalent to Bittorrent magnet infohash).
The protocol uses the Mainline Bittorrent DHT (not a custom DHT). There is no notion of block CIDs (no potential deduplication, but also less scalability issues for announcing each block CID on the DHT).
So that’s a lot of design simplifications that will improve implementation time.
If you are interested, have a try at Iroh-share, a CLI and TUI Rust implementation.
I really like two of their points:
I really hate because such projects as IPFS required me to install some extention and a niche component that is hard to understand. While it is easy for me to do it I have abandoned all hope that project like this would gain some broader popularity.
For example qbittorrent is already hard to use for most people and it does not require to install extention and background service. You just install an app.