For the past couple of days, I’ve been thinking and dreaming about hashes, file hashes to be exact. My fascination with hashes started with an idea to host a universal hash database that could be used to identify every file in the world. “As a starting point, it is my understanding that currently the most popular file distribution methods – notably HTTP and BitTorrent among others – are all arguably “filename”-based. For example, to distribute a file from a HTTP server, you specify a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) such as “http://server.com/file.txt“, and using BitTorrent, you create a .torrent file which specifies the filename “file.txt” among other things. A disadvantage to the “filename”-based distribution is that it does not consistently identify unique files. For example, a simple text file can have as many names as an appropriate file system supports. On that note, this is where my idea begins,” Long Zheng.