* DHTs are "invented" at Berkeley/MIT. Online storage is too expensive for most end users, so the target market is helping large companies index data in their filesystems.
* A bunch of content distribution protocols get built on top of the concept, the most popular being Bittorrent. Torrent protocols run into issues with the free rider problem, resulting in slow downloads. Meanwhile, storage on the web is becoming cheaper and cheaper.
* To solve the free rider problem, IPFS was created. A brilliant incentive structure was created so that asset hosting no longer relied on the benevolence torrent seeders. Meanwhile, companies like Cloudflare, Mega, Google and Amazon make online storage essentially free.
* Cloudflare starts hosting IPFS assets for free. Decentralized storage still exists, but is still slow in comparison and, in IPFS's case, is more expensive than free, so people only use IPFS addresses to download assets from large, centralized services.
* IPFS is mostly used as a distributed network of hashed addresses that can be used to look up data in a large company's filesystem.
BitTorrent was published in the same year as the original DHT protocols, and they kinda had nothing to do with each other until four years later (according to Wikipedia the Mainline DHT was added to the mainline client in November 2005).
* DHTs are "invented" at Berkeley/MIT. Online storage is too expensive for most end users, so the target market is helping large companies index data in their filesystems.
* A bunch of content distribution protocols get built on top of the concept, the most popular being Bittorrent. Torrent protocols run into issues with the free rider problem, resulting in slow downloads. Meanwhile, storage on the web is becoming cheaper and cheaper.
* To solve the free rider problem, IPFS was created. A brilliant incentive structure was created so that asset hosting no longer relied on the benevolence torrent seeders. Meanwhile, companies like Cloudflare, Mega, Google and Amazon make online storage essentially free.
* Cloudflare starts hosting IPFS assets for free. Decentralized storage still exists, but is still slow in comparison and, in IPFS's case, is more expensive than free, so people only use IPFS addresses to download assets from large, centralized services.
* IPFS is mostly used as a distributed network of hashed addresses that can be used to look up data in a large company's filesystem.