Right now, filecoin is only a whitepaper. There's no implementation yet. Possibly never.

Now, Filecoin seems to, from the whitepaper, gotten it right. We all know of the tragedy of the commons. Their solution was an elegant way around that, by granting filecoin to whom share their bandwidth and local storage. And then, others will take your coin for duplicating files you want copied.

But right now, it doesnt exist. And IPFS still works flawlessly.

> by granting filecoin to whom share their bandwidth and local storage

This is what every blockchain does.. (lottery mining)

>But right now, it doesnt exist. And IPFS still works flawlessly

Reading the IPFS website, I was under the impression IPFS nodes were utilizing filecoin. My bad.

Filecoin is one of several proposed approaches for encouraging seeding ("pinning") in the IPFS network. In our network (Mediachain), we will probably start out by using tit-for-tat pinning between peers for this purpose.

The IPFS protocol thankfully works independently of any *coin.

It's not clear to me that Filecoin is any more or less of a scam than Bitcoin, nor that involving "blockchains" adds any value at all in this case.

I have used IPFS without any filecoin that I've been aware of. It was actually really simple like early versions of rails or symfony simple or simpler.

And if there was a filecoin scam in there I didn't notice it neither on my pc nor on my bank or cash.