Problem

Providing is an expensive operation and even with significant DHT speedups is likely to remain so. The growth of the IPFS network has made this problem more acute. It would be beneficial if IPFS instances could choose to provide only a subset of all nodes without dramatically impacting the availability and retrieval speed of the data.

Notes

The Go-IPFS team began discussion of this problem in our October 2018 London meetup.

• @Kubuxu devised an algorithm and associated visualization that demonstrated the selection of good nodes for providing.
• A requirement for all partial providing strategies is associated changes in bitswap (or whatever) that allow it to walk 'up' the dag from a node, searching for providers of ancestor nodes (since the current node may never have been provided).