You can publish static content that doesn't go down when the server goes down and scales on its own as the content becomes more popular. It also has hashing built-in, so you can be sure the content you got is what you wanted,
Things like distribution of apt packages becomes much more exciting when each computer can choose to redistribute the packages it got to others in the LAN or area, even offline.
It's also very interesting to me how all the visitors to your website become servers as well, so content can never be "hugged to death" or links can never go stale, as long as at least one person has the content somewhere on their node.
That, to me, is huge, as links now go stale with some regularity. Think of all the Geocities sites (and all versions of them) just existing for ever, regardless if Geocities decided to shut down.
Nothing has any advantage except the advantages it has. I don't want to repeat everything I said in the last post, but what you mentioned isn't a counterargument to any of what I detailed.
Your browsers get's those files, the first from the site, the other from a CDN. Your site scales according to the band-width that "cdn.com" is able to provide to you.
In IPFS, you visit a site, get the index and it references two more files with two URLS:
"ipfs://QmWYudWcbX6skKub5wg1Ga3LFh3vbW2k7PWfdqHtDYvAdp" (for fun I used the right address here)
"ipfs://QmT9qk3CRYbFDWpDFYeAv8T8H1gnongwKhh5J68NLkLir6"
Your browser gets those files, the first is found in about a billion places. A lot of sites use jQuery so almost everyone has the file's content available, and because you'd already had visited another site with that content-hash, IPFS knew it could just use that one (a perfect safe cross-domain cache-hit). The second is found in less places, but it follows the same logic as a torrent, with data coming from both a IPFS cdn the site uses, along with a few people who've also seen the video, so it loads faster from a few sources than one.
Hope this makes sense. IPFS is really just a decent way to implement websites like a torrent and enjoy the benefits that brings. It's not grand or out of this world, just decent space-saving data-management.
No, and I was looking hard. IPFS is a slower, no-SLA version of S3 at this stage. People try to sell it with this planetary-scale marketing phrase just like they were trying to sell MongoDB with the web-scale phrase. Once you understand that the use cases for asymmetric uplink powered file sharing are latency and availability you also understand that the use cases are very limited for such storage. Mostly torrent really or cold backup maybe.
