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Comment by haswell | Hacker News Reader

This is a question that legitimately needs to be asked. web3 is not just about money, or it should not be called web3.

I think that the lack of a consistent definition and understanding of what web3 is supposed to solve is why every thread about it turns into a bit of a mess.

e.g IPFS is generally considered part of web3, and is not about money at all.

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Not all about money, but they now have a couple questionable endeavors like Filecoin and NFT.storage. It seems they are more interested in making money than improving their project, and IPFS has many outstanding issues and limitations.

Using blockchain ontop of IPFS is to provide incentives. I don't know what is "questionable" about Filecoin, it seems fine to me. I used IPFS before blockchain but mostly just to play around with, never for any serious projects. Filecoin is simply a way to get more people to use IPFS. NFT.storage is the same, they see a market they would be a perfect fit for and try to get more and more people using IPFS.

The last I checked Filecoin cost around $17/TB of storage, which is ridiculously high. Like most cryptos they pumped the market and profit from hype than actually providing a competitive service. It is lower tier storage too than you'd get through something like OneDrive or Google Drive.

NFT.storage is well, to put it nicely, a scam platform to drive traffic to Filecoin.

IPFS is still complicated and inefficient because it spews provider records to bazillions of blocks, because they insist on random access to files and chunks.

As far as I know it also still spews your entire wantlist to all peers, which could be hundreds, in hopes that maybe one of them happens to have a popular block you want.

It's also immutable first. So you can't change anything without changing the parent, and so on all the way up the tree, which is fine for some kinds of content but not others.

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