I can't say I disagree with any of this (except maybe the cryptocurrency bit), this was my experience as well. I even made a pinning service (
https://eternum.io) years ago, but I shut it down after having to deal with the umpteenth frustration of the IPFS server being slow, not discovering data, not pinning, taking up all the resources, taking up all the space, not pinning, failing to find other nodes, and not pinning.
I think IPFS is a great idea, but I don't think IPFS is a good IPFS. Give me something that is a content-addressable network of people who want to archive/store sets, that sounds like a much better thing.
Imagine: You have 200 GB of free disk space and you want to donate it to the Internet Archive. You connect to its tracker and say "give me 200 GB of your rarest content". The tracker obliges, and soon you have 200 GB of blocks. Or, you can ask people to help you keep your site online, so they pin up to X GB of it. Or, you dedicate Y GB to your OS's packages, and you can fetch them from and send them to other people without needing to contact the package servers at all.
This sounds very much like "BitTorrent but with extensible data sets". Maybe I'll see if it's close enough that I can build it without too much hassle, hmm...
I think IPFS is a great idea, but I don't think IPFS is a good IPFS. Give me something that is a content-addressable network of people who want to archive/store sets, that sounds like a much better thing.
Imagine: You have 200 GB of free disk space and you want to donate it to the Internet Archive. You connect to its tracker and say "give me 200 GB of your rarest content". The tracker obliges, and soon you have 200 GB of blocks. Or, you can ask people to help you keep your site online, so they pin up to X GB of it. Or, you dedicate Y GB to your OS's packages, and you can fetch them from and send them to other people without needing to contact the package servers at all.
This sounds very much like "BitTorrent but with extensible data sets". Maybe I'll see if it's close enough that I can build it without too much hassle, hmm...