People `ipfs pin` the images to satisfy their data lust, and instantly become part of the growing swarm of computers which are now serving the content to new visitors.
€50 per month for 50TB of traffic = 50 mio x 1MB file downloads. The costs are so low, that CDNs are practically free. Oh wait, CloudFlare IS free for such primitive use cases.
The big difference with Skynet is that you pay for professionals to pin the data on your behalf. It works better for unpopular files because you aren't relying on the uptime of people at home.
It also works better for popular files because the professionals generally have great bandwidth and good peering.
There are a bunch of other benefits as well, such as access to an api that allows skynet pages/apps to upload and download. For something like this you wouldn't use those endpoints but if you wanted to make say a decentralized blogger, you could use those endpoints to upload posts that users write.
> because you aren't relying on the uptime of people at home
IPFS doesn't automatically spread whatever you put into your client, so you should never rely on others to randomly host your content for you. In fact, if you start a default IPFS node, add your content then turn it off again, no one is gonna have the content you added.
Would have been interesting to hear a fair/impartial comparison between Skynet and IPFS but your misunderstanding of IPFS is now evident so maybe someone else can fill in the gaps?
People `ipfs pin` the images to satisfy their data lust, and instantly become part of the growing swarm of computers which are now serving the content to new visitors.