but I guess you agree that a single node storage on IPFS doesn’t really have much positive advantage over just putting it on a basic http server?

same as with bittorrent? a single seeder isn’t much better than just setting up a regular http server, but if more people decide to download and seed it, then you have infinite horizontal scale in bandwidth and resilience, all in a decentralized manner, same thing with ipfs

it’s already been used for large scale backups by sci hub and libgen

This is also what I thought until I looked into the actual hardware requirements of Filecoin, which require a hoster to purchase the very latest AFAIK Intel based hardware (for the required cryptography).

i don’t really see a problem in that, if they are going to compete with enterprise grade storage offers then you need good hardware to run it

Filecoin has a really high overall storage need Vs. usable storage, something like 100:1 if I recall correctly.

that seems awfully high to have any semblance of practicality, could you provide a source on that?

Something like 30% of the total possible volume of Filecoins was pre-minted and exclusively sold to accredited investors, which primarily included some really shady venture capitalist firms.

yeah, pre-mining sucks, but that’s just how ICOs work, no?