alt Hacker NewsI guess IPFS is an artifact from the crypto craze. It's pretty silly if you think of it. However, I must admit, I got my first ever developer grant from Filecoin while they were flush with ZIRP era money.
btw,I thought it was an Initial Coin Offering, not an actual fundraise.
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IIRC IPFS was the latest in a long line of Distributed Content-Addressed systems that long predate crypto. AFAICT (obviously I wasn't paying much attention) they went crypto (FileCoin) to fund a base population of storage users to bootstrap its popularity.
But that didn't pan out.
What people did or planned to do with IPFS is pretty silly, but the idea of content addressed storage with cryptographic (not in a crypo coin way) names makes a lot of sense. It would make for a great software distribution method e.g. your game downloads get faster the more people want to play the latest version. It's the combination of Git and BitTorrent and has uses far beyond just hosting warez and NFTs.
What's silly about it? Content-addressable decentralized storage -- not tied to a cryptocurrency -- is really valuable for censorship-resistant archiving of politically-sensitive data (such as climate change research).