Ipfs pubsub sub --encoding json... who is "from?"

Help Coding
1

I tried out ipfs pubsub with the suggested ipfs pubsub sub foo and ipfs pubsub pub foo "hello world" and it worked great. Then I tried ipfs pubsub sub --encoding json foo and once again published “hello world”.

{"from":"EiDLdl0RJLAxxBwLSZISChtzTkFp1CggnKW2nbxjN55qMQ==","data":"aGVsbG8gd29ybGQ=","seqno":"FSzcm/r0Jr4=","topicIDs":["foo"]}

Great! It shows the “from” address there? That’ll let me know who’s publishing what! Except… who the heck is EiDLdl?

$ ipfs key list -l
Qmc2t9rdUJUAGco7syubbzEGipeqq4rvBpiC7RsKjbZM3E self

Qmc2t9 is certainly not EiDLdl even though I watched myself publish “hello world.” Is there some way to convert between EiDLdl and Qmc2t9? Is EiDLdl just a useless session key or something? I tried base64 decoding EiDLdl but it was just binary data, not Qmc2t9.

2

also ipfs id gives "ID": "Qmc2t9rdUJUAGco7syubbzEGipeqq4rvBpiC7RsKjbZM3E", as might be expected. I’m just puzzled where EiDLdl is coming from. In the go-libp2p-floodsub module, it says it’s “p.host.ID()” where p.host is a host.Host for go-libp2p-host. And in the latter module, it says Host is an object participating in a p2p network, which implements protocols or provides services.

So is “from” just some sort of a hash of my ipfs node’s IP address, unrelated to ipfs id?

I guess you have to publish /ipns/ URLs with pubsub, if you want each publication to be associated with a key.

3

That’s the peer from which the message was received. Unfortunately, it looks like we’re base64 encoding it instead of base58 encoding it. Please file a bug.

FYI, you can work around this by base64 decoding it and then bas58 encoding it.

4

Oh, right, base58. That’s what’s going on. I forgot peers IDs were base58 encoded for display. Thanks stebalien!