[jillesvangurp]

I'm involved with a startup that has been trying to use IPFS. There are still a few problems related to incentivizing people to pin files for you. Filecoin, the ICO coin associated with IPFS has been inching closer to a testnet launch for quite long now. That was supposed to happen end of last year and it didn't as far as I know. So, they are obviously a bit behind schedule on that. Without that, content on IPFS is only as durable as the node that uploaded the content. There are no guarantees long term availability of content.

So, IPFS is more of a CDN than a file system currently. It's a distributed content cache. There's an enormous long tail of files that are only available on 1 node, which is typically somebody's laptop.

Another problem is that the block system does not combine well with e.g. s3 or similar file buckets on popular cloud providers. If you think of IPFS as a CDN then you basically have to worry about hosting files somewhere that is reliable and durable. IPFS does not solve that problem currently. So, you basically will either be self hosting some file servers or use something off the shelf, like S3. There's an S3 backend for IPFS but it's a bit unclear how well that performs. We've done some tests with it and the small blocksize is creating quite a bit of overhead for read and write HTTP requests.

Access control or privacy protection are currently not really in scope of IPFS. I doubt this is a good tool for bypassing e.g. censor ship unless you are willing to expose yourself to explaining why your node is hosting certain content hashes. TOR and I2P probably provide better protection here. I2P actually runs a variant of bittorrent for file sharing. It's been a while since I looked at this but it used to be quite slow but reliable.