Does IPFS really work? As I understand it, it's sort of like a pay version of BitTorrent. In theory, you're supposedly renting space on hard disks of random users. In practice, you're probably renting space from AWS at a markup.
I was interested in IPFS as a possible asset storage system for assets for virtual worlds. Not for piracy, but as a way to sell virtual world assets with no ongoing obligation to host the content. You store the ownership on some blockchain and the content in some storage system with pre-paid "perpetual care".
I'd seen one offer at $5/gigabyte/forever.
The idea is supposed to be that Filecoin is a derivative of future declines in storage pricing, and profits on that derivative pay for the storage. Unclear if this works. There's one seller offering "perpetual storage" for a one-time fee. But their terms of service say "Data will be stored at no cost to the user on IPFS for as long as Protocol Labs, Inc. continues to offer free storage for NFT’s." No good.
(Just once, I'd like to see an application for NFTs that actually did something besides power a make-money-fast scheme.)
I think it's worth separating what IPFS provides from what Filecoin offers (note that I work at the Filecoin Foundation/Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, but I'm hopefully being sufficiently technical here that the description is as objective as I can be.)
IFPS is a model for providing a content-addressable storage system -- so if you have a particular hash (the CID) of a piece of content, you can obtain it without having to know where or who (or how many people) are storing it. Obviously one site on the IPFS network you're using has to have stored that data, but it only needs to be one site. More sites make it easier and quicker to access. Almost all IPFS nodes are run and offered for free, either by volunteers, major services like Cloudflare or Protocol Labs' dweb.link (which act as gateways so that you can access that file network over http/https) or web services that you pay to host your content on IPFS and manage it through a traditional API, like Textile or Fleek, or Fission.codes.
The key point here for someone with your use case, is that you have lots of flexibility as to who is hosting your files. You can start off just running your own node, or pay someone else, or pay lots of providers that are geographically diverse, or just do it among a bunch of volunteers. You're not tied to a single provider, because wherever your data is stored, you or your users will be able to find it.
Filecoin is a project to fix the incentive issues that can affected historical decentralizing projects like bittorrent, and can lead to decentralizing attempts like this collapse into just a single centralized service like AWS.
Storage providers on the Filecoin network negotiate directly with customers to store files -- they receive payment directly from those customers, but they are also incentivized to offer storage, and also store those files over the long term, because Filecoin has a proof-of-storage setup where storage providers get utility coins in return for proving that they're either making space available, or storing customers' files. It's all very zero-knowledge-proof and fancy, but the important thing is that with this in place, and a flat, competitive market for storage, storage provides on this network have good commercial reasons to offer low prices, and don't care if you're not tied directly to them (in the way that Amazon and other traditional storage providers are tempted to lock you in.)
Filecoin isn't so much a derivative of future declines, but a way to establish pricing in an environment where there actually is a free(r) market for online storage. And IPFS is a protocol that establishes one part of that freer market, which is to decouple who is storing your files, from how you might access them in the future. So far, this seems to be working, with prices being much cheaper than the alternatives, and with some degree of geographical and organizational diversity: https://file.app/
Storage providers are also now also competing on other aspects, such as ecological impact (see https://github.com/protocol/FilecoinGreen-tools ), speed of access, etc, which is what you might expect in a flatter market. We also see larger storage providers providing separate markets for large, >1 Pebibyte customers.
Happy to talk about this more, I'm danny@fil.org. Big fan of your work, etc, etc.
IPFS works, although performance might be an issue for rarely-requested files since most of them (file blocks) will require multiple hops to get to. If the file's stored on some reliable ipfs node(s), anywhere, you'll be able to access that file eventually.
Filecoin, however noble it may be, doesn't seem to be taking off (yet). IPFS doesn't currently work very well as a storage service because there's no guaranteed storage by others. Even if filecoin achieved mass adoption, you'd have to pay someone to host your files to get reliable 3rd party storage, and that offered fee might not be adequate motivation.
IPFS works perfectly well, though, for hosting file(s) yourself without the risk of getting your network link saturated if popularity of the file(s) increases a lot. As an auto-scaling CDN, it works great, though with poor performance for rarely accessed files. The solution to the file storage problem, it seems to me, is to integrate existing CDNs with ipfs, to allow fast serving of rarely-accessed files for low cost, and then cease serving it from the CDN once a file is popular enough that it's getting duplicated by a bunch of IPFS nodes for free. Maybe cloudflare can plug that rarely-accessed-file gap and offer file access, integrated with ipfs, at zero hosting cost.
I was interested in IPFS as a possible asset storage system for assets for virtual worlds. Not for piracy, but as a way to sell virtual world assets with no ongoing obligation to host the content. You store the ownership on some blockchain and the content in some storage system with pre-paid "perpetual care". I'd seen one offer at $5/gigabyte/forever.
The idea is supposed to be that Filecoin is a derivative of future declines in storage pricing, and profits on that derivative pay for the storage. Unclear if this works. There's one seller offering "perpetual storage" for a one-time fee. But their terms of service say "Data will be stored at no cost to the user on IPFS for as long as Protocol Labs, Inc. continues to offer free storage for NFT’s." No good.
(Just once, I'd like to see an application for NFTs that actually did something besides power a make-money-fast scheme.)