I view the favorable performance characteristics of IPFS at scale (over the current centralized client-server architecture of the present web) more as a general symptom of the pathology resulting from the incomplete, ill-planned architecture of the web in general.
The greatest advantage of an architecture like IPFS instead lies in its friendliness to more a democratic, semantic web, in which users and programs may make use of URI's at a fine-grained and peer-to-peer level. If we can decouple resources from a central server, and then build programs around these static resources, the web will not only become more permanent, but also more robust against walled-gardens robbing us of programmatic control of those resources.
To paraphrase the Plan 9 authors[1], it might make sense to say that a p2p, content addressable web should try to build a web out of a lot of little systems, not a system out of a lot of little webs. (Well, that doesn't completely make sense, and I'm starting to mix my metaphors, but my point is that what we have now is significantly hindered by lack of fine-grained semantics allowing interop. Hypermedia has the potential to be so much more than simply manipulating the DOM with some javascript!)
Glad you mention semantic web-- it tends to be a very tricky word with most hacker cultures, because everyone loves to hate on failed attempts :( :( -- but in fact SW (Linked Data!) is a super interesting model that has made Google and Facebook tons and tons of money (Knowledge Graph and Open Graph!). One interesting fallout of IPFS is that we can make Linked Data waaaaay more robust and faster, because you no longer need the _insane_ tons of little HTTP hits to query, retrieve content, retrieve other content + definitions, etc., on each request. With IPFS we can turn everything into a (merkle)dag and distribute it as a single bundle of objects. think Browserify/Webpack but for Linked Data. All with valid content addressing and signatures :)
And +1 to plan9 -- plan9 (in particular Fossil/Venti and 9p) have always been great inspirations for me, and their philosophy surfaces a lot in IPFS. From the fossil/venti (git) approach to content, to making everything mountable, to just using the path namespace for everything, etc. :)
(ps: woah, a message positive on BOTH Linked Data AND plan9! unexpected find!)
Thanks for the fantastic work. Your project represents something that I'd love to use, and would love to help succeed. I have some coursework to attend to, but I'd love to get involved at some point.
The greatest advantage of an architecture like IPFS instead lies in its friendliness to more a democratic, semantic web, in which users and programs may make use of URI's at a fine-grained and peer-to-peer level. If we can decouple resources from a central server, and then build programs around these static resources, the web will not only become more permanent, but also more robust against walled-gardens robbing us of programmatic control of those resources.
To paraphrase the Plan 9 authors[1], it might make sense to say that a p2p, content addressable web should try to build a web out of a lot of little systems, not a system out of a lot of little webs. (Well, that doesn't completely make sense, and I'm starting to mix my metaphors, but my point is that what we have now is significantly hindered by lack of fine-grained semantics allowing interop. Hypermedia has the potential to be so much more than simply manipulating the DOM with some javascript!)
[1] http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/9.html