IPFS Multihash

Multihash (as used by IPFS), is a protocol for differentiating outputs from various well-established cryptographic hash functions, addressing size + encoding considerations.

It is useful to write applications that future-proof their use of hashes, and allow multiple hash functions to coexist. For a longer discussion see github

Working out how to compute an IPFS multihash is not straight forwards - blogspot.co.uk

With regard to the creation of a DreamFactory IPFS Service we can use the Go command-line utility to construct fast file multihashes in order to rename files for inclusion in the Decentralised Media Commons - github

What we need to be able to do is calculate the IPFS multihash as fast as possible - so that the script can rename the file to the multihash before asynchronously adding it to IPFS.