Yes. The internet is broken, and a lot of these companies are based on selling "solutions" to these artificial problems.
Another example is Cloudflare. If the internet was designed properly, you wouldn't have DDoS attacks in the first place. There would be no one to sell DDoS protection to, no one to rent out botnets to.
You wouldn't even need most web/file "hosting" in the traditional sense if you could just share static files with bittorrent/IPFS.
Right. I'll bite, how is Dropbox not a _real_ solution to a _real_ problem of "I want to share this file with someone else or somewhere else"? Hate to say it but I feel like the answer is going to involve "web3 fixes this".
Peer-to-peer file transfers will always be faster than having an intermediary. Why not use bittorrent or IPFS?
P.S. The problem dropbox "fixes" is that there is no decent file transfer protocol that is IP agnostic. Using something like bittorrent's or IPFS' DHT fixes this. Dropbox "fixes" this by making file transfer into a paid service
> Peer-to-peer file transfers will always be faster than having an intermediary. Why not use bittorrent
One reason is that such a scenario relies on one of my computers with bittorrent-dropbox to be online for me to access my files elsewhere. Syncing it in the cloud means they are available reliably.
Okay, cool, the majority of Dropbox users I know do not use the product because of speed or because of any IP agnosticism. It's a shame all these users are so stupid and don't use IPFS or bittorrent instead, amirite?
The last time I used IPFS it took four hours before I could access the file just using the hash or even the public gateway after pushing it to several major pinning services.
I've had files sitting on Google Drive for longer than IPFS has existed. Let's not pretend that IPFS/etc is a solution to relying on services that are far older than it.
I don't know if I would jump straight to a grift, it comes down to use case. If people are just dumping random documents, sure. And selling people that they need to back up every picture they have taken on their phone that they will probably not look at again is a bit grifty. However keeping digital copies of important documents is not a bad idea, like a house burnt down situation. Ideally, you maybe have family you can trust to keep a USB with those documents, but that is not always an option for some people.
Another example is Cloudflare. If the internet was designed properly, you wouldn't have DDoS attacks in the first place. There would be no one to sell DDoS protection to, no one to rent out botnets to.
You wouldn't even need most web/file "hosting" in the traditional sense if you could just share static files with bittorrent/IPFS.