[rememberlenny]

From what I understand, thats not what its about. AWS and all of the various centralized hosting providers are still valuable.

The idea of web 3.0 and the ethereum/ipfs structure is that you have a fat client and thin server. This means that all the business logic sits on the client and the server is just utility.

Filecoin and the ifps structure allows content like text or images to be stored in a place that the smart contract based client could access.

Some recent examples are:

- Marketplace that uses ifps to store data: https://demo.originprotocol.com

- Game (not sure if this uses ifps) http://cryptokitties.co

[Groxx]

AFAIK cryptokitties is "just" a clever Ethereum smart contract system. Has nothing to do with IPFS.

That said, I'm not familiar with it in-depth, and I'd love to hear otherwise if someone knows!

[Aunche]

Why not just do this without the overhead of mining and maintaining a blockchain? Surely there's a more efficient way of maintaining a public distributed file system.

[pfraze]

In the Dat world, we have https://hashbase.io, a self-deployable service for rehosting archives

[rictic]

If you have a system where anyone can provide storage and anyone can buy storage, then you need to have a system to verify that the files are actually being stored. As I understand it, that's filecoin mining.

Filecoin eliminates a lot of the overhead of selling storage, but it adds some overhead all its own. The big question is: which is larger, and by how much?

[tylersmith]

That's what IPFS is. Filecoin is an extension on top of IPFS to allow people to pay to ensure their content stays available.

[pdx]

There is. It's SAFE Network. https://safenetwork.org/