Obviously, no one is going to admit it because then your network is tainted but every file sharing outfit ultimately ends up do pirated.

I've been mining lbry and it seems lot more ahead of these others. https://lbry.io/

The beneficiary will be AIs, not humans.

Right now, we're just now thinking of clouds, containers, and "serverless" (functions-as-a-service). If we take those ideas and iterate them forward, we converge closer to a real "serverless" paradigm -- what Ethereum already provides today in principle, if not at scale. This will require storage that can keep up with it, and that is where FileCoin comes in. While human consumers may benefit from this, it enables autonomous software that can live on its own and manage its own matabolism (resources accounted for through the blockchain). What those autonomous software will do? I don't really know.

Filecoin to my knowledge has or will have no capabilities of sharing files. It's dumb end-to-end encrypted decentral storage (which is a good thing!).

However, the IPFS team is aware of this problem, and is building in measures to allow nodes to opt out of storing globally available blacklists of known bad objects (i.e. pirated content or illegal content)

In practice, this is definitely a really hard problem to solve, and very important. But I think doable.

I'm personally glad that the fathers of the internet had better things to do than moralizing legality.

Sounds like the opposite of something most would consider "important".

I think blocking a hash can already be a victory, since it basically makes all the metadata that was associated with the hash useless and forces reseeding under a new hash and publicizing that hash. As long as you make it inconvenient enough, very few people will bother, which is the best the copyright holders can hope for.

Reseeding might be pretty easy though in IPFS since there is a block layer below the object layer, and I guess you can't really block block-hashes.

Eventually I'd like to open source code that lets any user create their own index/search server and potentially charge for usage if they want.

You can't implement indexing and search over end to end encrypted data file chunks. You would have to work with the hash of complete files and a localizer, and you want that in the initial design.

Care to elaborate and share examples of other "good, earl technology"? Typically when I hear "solution in search of a problem", I start thinking "this is going nowhere".

Not insinuating, that's my claim - nearly every big technology was too early (eg. a solution looking for a problem - whether in form or scale) before it blew up years or decades later. I don't think that's controversial. It's also true that a lot of trash that never makes it are also solutions in search of problems.

Decentralized blockchain orchestration of storage = you can raise $200M... in the first hour.

That would mean filecoin is less about the use of decentral file storage, but more about giving people a different way to create something that looks like bitcoin that does not involve buying sold-out gpus, unlike ethereum, and storing files is more comfortable than having a gpu make noise all the time anyway.

I think by the way, that's absolutely vital to progress, and I am glad someone has convinced VC/Money to fund something potentially breakthrough (whether I think it is or not).