It could turn out to be a flop, but the only people that would lose would be accredited investors who, according to regulations, should know better. I would say Filecoin has at least as good of a chance of succeeding as any ordinary VC investment.
https://ipfs.io/images/ipfs-applications-diagram.png for some examples of applications using IPFS. Visit https://ipfs.io/ for more info.
I've personally used it for storing large binaries outside of git. My build process requires using some binaries and fetching them by hash is much better than fetching them from some url.
This is a good indicator of a technology's novelty, but it has zero correlation with the product/market fit.
Internet = Once curiosity, small, for geeks
Internet = Success
Filecoin = Is curiosity, small, for geeks
Filecoin = SuccessIPFS doesn't really have a killer app people actually care about as long as we're not actually interplanetary - the internet connection from any point to another on the planet is generally good enough.
Here is a subforum dedicated to discussing use cases of IPFS. https://discuss.ipfs.io/c/ecosystem/applications-of-ipfs/16
I don't understand the basis for this accusation. I thought the reason for Filecoin was essentially to provide an incentive layer to run IPFS nodes. The problem with IPFS was that it largely drew from volunteer efforts and therefore if you want to actually want IPFS to be a high-performing and low cost service you need to provide a market incentive structure to run a node.
Of course you can build something super distributed and fractional on top of that. Maybe d.tube and lbry are such things, but the more venture capital is involved the less I tend to trust such efforts.
Filecoin turns file storage into a marketplace, which is a significant improvement. Currently S3 charges a large premium because you wouldn't trust many other people to reliably hold on to your data. I expect this will cause the cost of file storage to plummet.
Your venture capital heuristic is a good one, but I think the rest of what we know about Filecoin overwhelms it.
Releasing an actual product is more of a side product. If you don't develop or release anything, and just buy yourself Porsches, it's textbook embezzlement. But if you spend the money in a plausible way, you're mostly safe, even if the product turns out a major flop.
Unless you get greedy and start doing too shady stuff, like issuing yourself tokens under the table, that the founders apparently did.