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Comment by jMyles | Hacker News Reader

Are speculators making money on ipfs? How? This is news to me.

The IPFS website at the bottom left contains a section "Protocol labs", the "About" link of that links to https://protocol.ai/ which says "We're decentralizing storage with Filecoin".

So their end goal might be making money off that cryptocurrency...

Thanks to the GP for causin me to figure out why the wheel is being re-invented here! :)

Why is adding an incentive mechanism to "pinning" files on IPFS inherently wrong? If you find the right incentives to a tech problem, that pushes the tech forward right? Like Satoshi Nakomoto putting together the right type of incentive to be able to create an almost unhackable network in Bitcoin (along with Ethereum and others).

I'm not yet saying that Protocol Labs will ultimately find the success they're looking for BUT writing off their efforts as "just a way to make money off of cryptocurrency" I feel is pretty dismissive.

It's not dismissive. They already got their money. $257 million, to be exact. No one knows how Filecoin is going to make money except for Protocol Labs.

By providing value, therefore driving up the market price of the integral reward. Currently at $22, not bad for a random coin.

I.e, the value of the coin is driven by the interest in the tech it provides.

That's a very hand-wavy answer, no?

"The market price of the integral reward"? What is that supposed to mean? Filecoin is just a medium of exchange for people buying and selling storage services. Filecoin does not offer anything specific and its platform has to compete with plenty of mature, efficient alternatives.

> the value of the coin is driven by the interest in the tech it provides.

What "tech" does it provide? Not IPFS, for sure, that already was under development and could have come to fruition as a regular open source project. A decentralized market for storage, "proof-of-spacetime"? These might be interesting. But again, if we want to fund these things there are surely better/cheaper ways to do it. $250 million is a lot of money for the tech that was developed so far.

More importantly: there is nothing about the "tech" that requires $FIL to make it work. The market dynamics will be the same whether they used FIL, DAI, ETH, wrapped BTC or even a dollar-pegged token they decided to issue. People are not going to pay more or less for their storage because the price of the token went up or down.

> Currently at $22, not bad for a random coin.

These are the kind of statements that almost make me side with the buttcoiners. At this point, with all the speculation, market manipulation and naive FOMO "investing", there is no useful information to be had from the price of the token.

I don't think the claim is that it's wrong, I think it's just trying to answer "Why do people constantly have to re-invent the wheel? :(".

"X but we monetized it" (which includes "X but we got VCs to pay us") is an extremely common reason to reinvent X.

...yes, of course I'm familiar with Filecoin. If that is the explanation for how speculation prompts use of IPFS over Freenet (both of which I adore), then there is no explanation.

via Filecoin: "In short: IPFS addresses and moves content, while Filecoin is an incentive layer to persist data."

https://docs.ipfs.io/concepts/faq/#ipfs-and-filecoin

Are they separate layers? Could I use IPFS in my own project, or is it intrinsically tied to Filecoin?

Of course you can. There is no substance to this line of reasoning except that PL publishes both.

It's like saying speculating on py-umbral (a standalone open source project) because we use it to build NuCypher (a blockchain-dependent open source project).

They can. Think of it like a torrent file and a webseed. You can freely use torrents to distribute your content, but if everyone who has ever downloaded it goes offline, any new downloaders will be stuck at 0% forever.

The only add on here is that you can pay some service in filecoin to keep seeding your torrent forever.

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