[tommynicholas]

Great questions, and not to be unnecessarily pedantic, but IPFS is not a method of storage. IPFS is a replacement for HTTP and has a lot of attractive qualities and works in production today.

Filecoin is a method of incentivizing decentralized storage on IPFS and many of the questions you've asked are either totally or partially unsolved.

Those questions will ostensibly be solved by groups (possibly Protocol Labs, the creators of IPFS and Filecoin, possibly others) over time. That's kind of the bet you have to make if you buy Filecoin, but it's not a bet you have to make to use IPFS today or build a solution on IPFS that works at least for your ends but not all ends.

Hope that makes sense - it's worth digging in more on the forums themselves as to which of those problems are more or less solved and what the possible solutions are.

[confusedrobot]

What is to stop it from just being used for storage though? I see no reason to just use IPFS as a place to dump static files, besides ethical ones.

[tommynicholas]

Sorry just to be clear - you can literally not use IPFS for storage, it doesn't "have" memory or compute or anything. It's a protocol.