Discussion: New ID types for parcels

[thomastaylor312]

After some great discussion and feedback at Cloud Native Wasm Day (huge hat tip to @carlsverre for this), I think we should have a discussion about how we attach IDs to parcels. There are 2 distinct possibilities here: CIDs and DIDs.

Here are my initial observations as to the benefits/tradeoffs of each one

CIDs

• Still use SHA256 for the underlying multihash, but has support for other hash types in the future
• Universally unique ID that can be used with things like IPFS
• Lots of libraries available (including Rust) for different languages
• I don't know if it is super widely used outside of IPFS or not. Basically it isn't a "standard" in the strictest sense

DIDs

• A W3C standard
• Identifiers that are generated and assigned by the specific entity
• This approach seems a little heavyweight for what we need in Bindle

Basically I feel like CIDs might be a better option for us, but I want to leave it open for discussion so we can do some more research

[carlsverre]

CID/DID resources:

• IPFS CID speciication.
• W3C DID Core specification
• W3C Multihash proposal
• W3C Linked Data Proofs proposal
• relevant github issue on CIDs and W3C
• IPID
  • and https://github.com/jonnycrunch/ipid

Dat Protocol Another project worth learning about to get inspiration is the Dat protocol. An interesting point about Dat is that it also has a invoice architecture similar to Bindle allowing a single "Dat" to contain many files. It's also possible to put a database in a Dat or another non-trivial data structure.

[thomastaylor312]

I feel like dat could be a really interesting backend for bindle