So I got curious about IPFS recently and spend a couple of hours reading through the docs and tutorials. Good news: it’s a very well documented and very ambitious project. The docs in fact struck me as “too good”. As in, this isn’t some amateur writing them there is clearly a ton of work that went into it all. Which made me curious: how does a relatively unknown open source project do this? Where is the money?

Well, the answer was about half way through the tutorial. Basically say you want to publish a web page on IPFS. You put it together on your laptop and start up the IPFS daemon. Cool, you are now online and everyone can see your stuff. But what happens when you disconnect from your Wi-Fi? Well you can have your content pinned by another party and have them serve it. After all, IPFS is all about content addressing so it doesn’t matter who hosts it. But how does that work? Well, a paid service called Pinata is part of the official tutorial. No other service is mentioned. I am sure others exist but how is this going to be different than what we have with the web currently where a huge portion of content is served by a single company (CloudFlare)?