[frollogaston]

NFT artwork, if you count that. Briefly checked, the ones that were traded for the most were using IPFS rather than HTTP. But I also don't trust that these aren't self-wash sales (easy given the "NF" part), also NFTs are dumb.

[boramalper]

I don’t think NFTs (should) count: My first impressions of web3 by Moxie Marlinspike

https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

[benatkin]

Moxie doesn't trash NFTs or Web3 in that article. He just points out some limitations of the ecosystem.

Also, ipfs directly fixes one of the bigger issues:

> Instead of storing the data on-chain, NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data.

If it's ipfs, it points to the content. If it's ipns, it points to a changeable link to the content, but one that is made consistent through the network, preventing the trick of making it differ based on the referrer.

[frollogaston]

I still don't count it because NFTs have seemingly died off in popularity. If there were tons of money staying in NFTs, regardless of how silly I think it is, I'd consider that an important use case of IPFS.

[benatkin]

I don't think it matters if it's silly. I think it's highly successful, and that the success is continued. CryptoPunks is a clear example of genuine use of NFTs that still is an elite thing today, but another example is needed. I'll use this: if you go to Bored Apes and sort by recently sold, and look through them, you can see that there would have to be a lot of manipulation to have them rated in quality like they are. It just isn't plausible to me that a huge amount of those are self-dealing. If people were self-dealing, there would be a bunch of less cool ones with high prices, in order to try and get people to pay more for them. https://opensea.io/collection/boredapeyachtclub?sortDirectio...

[tehjoker]

His statement at the end was pretty interesting:

"If we do want to change our relationship to technology, I think we’d have to do it intentionally. My basic thoughts are roughly:

    We should accept the premise that people will not run their own servers by designing systems that can distribute trust without having to distribute infrastructure. This means architecture that anticipates and accepts the inevitable outcome of relatively centralized client/server relationships, but uses cryptography (rather than infrastructure) to distribute trust. One of the surprising things to me about web3, despite being built on “crypto,” is how little cryptography seems to be involved!
    We should try to reduce the burden of building software. At this point, software projects require an enormous amount of human effort. Even relatively simple apps require a group of people to sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day, every day, forever. This wasn’t always the case, and there was a time when 50 people working on a software project wasn’t considered a “small team.” As long as software requires such concerted energy and so much highly specialized human focus, I think it will have the tendency to serve the interests of the people sitting in that room every day rather than what we may consider our broader goals. I think changing our relationship to technology will probably require making software easier to create, but in my lifetime I’ve seen the opposite come to pass. Unfortunately, I think distributed systems have a tendency to exacerbate this trend by making things more complicated and more difficult, not less complicated and less difficult."

Funnily enough, later that year ChatGPT came out and blew away the excitement around cryptocurrencies by making software easier to manufacture to some degree. Though even with the latest LLM tools, I don't think this has changed at all so far: "Even relatively simple apps require a group of people to sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day, every day, forever." Maybe those people can program by texting from the coffee machine, but they're still working.