Well kinda. It's complicated.

> can't you use IFPS without cryptocurrencies?

You can. And you should.

Cryptocurrency is a solution in search of a problem. Problem it purports to solve isn't something you can solve via software.

> Problem it purports to solve isn't something you can solve via software.

That problem being sending money wherever you want, which is eminently solvable with software (mostly because it is almost all software everywhere).

There's been kind of two waves of "This is web3". The first was primarily about protocols like IPFS, dat/hyper, ... (2018/19?) and then at some point it got used more and more by blockchain folks, and they kind of dominate the conversation now. What it "actually" is is up in the air and not really defined. (But the blockchain scenario still often involves things like IPFS as underlying components)

b̵l̵o̵c̵k̵c̵h̵a̵i̵n̵ ̵f̵o̵l̵k̵s̵ NFT-hype snake-oil kids who seem to believe that cloud platforms === exposing something online. Most blockchain folks I know also despise it.

And, I'd even say it's three waves, the first being TBL semantic web, which predates bitcoin.

True, but the semantic web == web 3.0 angle has been dead for a long time, i.e. I haven't heard proponents of semantic web use "web 3.0" in a long time.

IPFS is basically torrenting, and doesn't even use a Blockchain. And of top of that people are not even using it properly, because centralized nodes seem to be the main wait to get access to the files.

> And of top of that people are not even using it properly, because centralized nodes seem to be the main wait to get access to the files.

That's because last i checked (admittedly a couple years ago) their software was slow and ressource intensive. Which is quite the opposite of what you want for real-life network transfer software. Meanwhile stuff like syncthing seem to get bittorrent-like transfer just fine.

Dat/hypercore seamed less bloaty (again a while ago), i wonder what the solid projects in this area are currently.. (torrent-based network filesystems)

IPFS has nothing to do with web3.

Web3 uses IPFS, the dependency tree is the wrong way around in your question.