[hinkley]

It's a bit like comparing monkeys and apes though. Yes they're all primates but the family tree does matter and you can't just mash them together.

IPFS resembles many previous attempts at distributed file storage, which did not use blockchain. They had other ways to encourage fairness, which appears to be the primary use of blockchain in IPFS. The existence of the concept of Merkle trees, named or unnamed, lead to blockchain, not the other way around. And it has other children, like some digital signature specs.