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Comment by john_moscow | Hacker News Reader

It is unsurprising given that the raison d'etre for Filecoin was never the demand for decentralized storage, or backup, or anything else. It was started with the sole purpose of raising money, because of the overwhelming demand for hype-driven investment opportunities that tick the typical checkboxes. And that was delivered perfectly.

Releasing an actual product is more of a side product. If you don't develop or release anything, and just buy yourself Porsches, it's textbook embezzlement. But if you spend the money in a plausible way, you're mostly safe, even if the product turns out a major flop.

Unless you get greedy and start doing too shady stuff, like issuing yourself tokens under the table, that the founders apparently did.

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This isn't true of Protocol Labs. They have already shipped IPFS, which is already in substantial use. Filecoin's testnet is live now, they have not shipped mainnet yet, but it's pretty imminent at this point. There are certainly some ICO scams out there, but I do not believe Filecoin was one of them. I still think $200m was too much, too soon. However, they didn't issue the tokens to themselves under the table. They issued a SAFT agreement for tokens to accredited investors in the United States, abiding by SEC regulations. They allocated 10 percent to investors, 15 percent to themselves, 5 percent to the Filecoin foundation, and 70 percent for Filecoin miners. That was all part of the upfront ICO.

It could turn out to be a flop, but the only people that would lose would be accredited investors who, according to regulations, should know better. I would say Filecoin has at least as good of a chance of succeeding as any ordinary VC investment.

What is the actual IPFS user base besides curiosity traffic and crypto speculators?

IPFS is an independent protocol from Filecoin. It is not a cryptocoin in and of itself. It is an alternative addressing system for content on the web. The idea is that files are organized by their contents (using a cryptographic hash of those contents) rather than by IP address. You can pin content with your own independently run IPFS node using any tech stack of your choosing. You can spin up a website powered by IPFS today and many people are already doing that.

https://ipfs.io/images/ipfs-applications-diagram.png for some examples of applications using IPFS. Visit https://ipfs.io/ for more info.

Cloudflare also provides a gateway to IPFS [1].

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/distributed-web-gateway/

Cloudflare's gateway also does down like 50% of the time. It is hardly reliable. But this isn't so much indicative as a problem with Cloudflare, more than IPFS is completely unreliable

Yeah, they probably did a partnership for extra visibility (Protocol labs could even have paid them to build it, as it increases the perceived value of IPFS and hence Filecoin). It still doesn't tell anything about demand.

I host my blog using IPFS.

How do you do this? I'm interested in mirroring my own sites to IPFS.

Here's a tutorial I followed: https://teetotality.blog/posts/how-this-blog-was-made/

File sharing/distributed hosting enthusiasts. You can spend plenty of time with IPFS without ever hearing of Filecoin.

That's curiosity traffic. People who experiment with new exciting tech as it comes out. When new tech is announced, they move on.

This is a good indicator of a technology's novelty, but it has zero correlation with the product/market fit.

It’s been used to prevent denial of service, such as in the Catalina succession vote.

I don't know if you knew this or not, but at one time in the not too distant past, the internet as a whole was a curiosity only used by geeks. And before that, only total nerds in their mom's basement used personal computers.

Yes but from that it does not follow that filecoin will experience the same kind of growth.

  Internet = Once curiosity, small, for geeks

  Internet = Success

  Filecoin = Is curiosity, small, for geeks

It is untrue that automatically follows

  Filecoin = Success

This shouldn't be down voted, it's an important thing to point out.

IPFS doesn't really have a killer app people actually care about as long as we're not actually interplanetary - the internet connection from any point to another on the planet is generally good enough.

Given IPFS is a protocol (think BitTorrent) and doesn't have any kind of token, your accusation that only "crypto speculators" use it outs you as not being particularly charitable here. I think if you look into it you'll find it's pretty useful.

I've personally used it for storing large binaries outside of git. My build process requires using some binaries and fetching them by hash is much better than fetching them from some url.

This Peer to Peer database is one example https://github.com/orbitdb/orbit-db

Here is a subforum dedicated to discussing use cases of IPFS. https://discuss.ipfs.io/c/ecosystem/applications-of-ipfs/16

I don't understand the basis for this accusation. I thought the reason for Filecoin was essentially to provide an incentive layer to run IPFS nodes. The problem with IPFS was that it largely drew from volunteer efforts and therefore if you want to actually want IPFS to be a high-performing and low cost service you need to provide a market incentive structure to run a node.

Historically, blockchain services have suffered from the situation that their price is pumped up to levels that cannot be justified by any level of adoption. So the resulting incentives are just for speculation and further pump-and-dump cycles instead of actual usage.

But there are already pinning services, conventionally paid by the person wanting to have something pinned.

Of course you can build something super distributed and fractional on top of that. Maybe d.tube and lbry are such things, but the more venture capital is involved the less I tend to trust such efforts.

Paying some pinning service is, architecturally, not much different than paying S3 to store your files.

Filecoin turns file storage into a marketplace, which is a significant improvement. Currently S3 charges a large premium because you wouldn't trust many other people to reliably hold on to your data. I expect this will cause the cost of file storage to plummet.

Your venture capital heuristic is a good one, but I think the rest of what we know about Filecoin overwhelms it.

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