Right now, filecoin is only a whitepaper. There's no implementation yet. Possibly never.
Now, Filecoin seems to, from the whitepaper, gotten it right. We all know of the tragedy of the commons. Their solution was an elegant way around that, by granting filecoin to whom share their bandwidth and local storage. And then, others will take your coin for duplicating files you want copied.
But right now, it doesnt exist. And IPFS still works flawlessly.
Filecoin is one of several proposed approaches for encouraging seeding ("pinning") in the IPFS network. In our network (Mediachain), we will probably start out by using tit-for-tat pinning between peers for this purpose.
I have used IPFS without any filecoin that I've been aware of. It was actually really simple like early versions of rails or symfony simple or simpler.
And if there was a filecoin scam in there I didn't notice it neither on my pc nor on my bank or cash.
Now, Filecoin seems to, from the whitepaper, gotten it right. We all know of the tragedy of the commons. Their solution was an elegant way around that, by granting filecoin to whom share their bandwidth and local storage. And then, others will take your coin for duplicating files you want copied.
But right now, it doesnt exist. And IPFS still works flawlessly.