In the future it will be possible to use Ethereum Dapps even if you don't have any ETH. The way it works now is that ETH is needed in order to pay for gas. However, it will be possible for the contract to pay for gas in the future. Developers would be able to add some ETH to their contract, so that it is free to use (or some parts of it are free) if they wanted to.
I'm also on the skeptic side of things though this intrigues me because it perhaps provides an alternate model to online ads which we're finally discovering the negative side effects of.
Isn't it integral to the way these dapps work however? Is there an other way to achieve the same results? After all eventually somebody has to pay the bill for there computations.
It seems to me that the big problem of dapps is not so much the fact that you need to pay to deploy them but that you have to pay so much to do anything meaningful. The system is extremely expensive compared to regular "not-trustless" distributed/cloud computing offerings out there.
For instance while browsing through the blockstack website I saw that the first such application was a "docs suite" (à la office/google docs) called "graphite": https://www.graphitedocs.com
That seemed interesting but my first thought was "man, if they store the files in the blockchain that must be absurdly expensive to use". They probably thought the same so, according to the FAQ at https://www.graphitedocs.com/faq :
>By default, your data is stored in a dedicated Microsoft Azure Blob. But you can and should connect your Blockstack Browser to your own cloud storage solutions (preferably multiple).
Oh. So that makes sense but doesn't that destroy the whole point of it? What if I decide to, say, use OpenOffice on my computer, encrypt the files using GnuPG and then upload them to dropbox, spideroak and some AWS bucket, wouldn't that effectively grant me the same privacy and control over my data?
I'm going to sound like a naysayer but it just looks like yet an other example of using blockchain for the sake of saying that you use the blockchain.
But of course it's just one dapp out of many. Let's see the next one, "stealthy": https://www.stealthy.im/
It's a "A secure decentralized communication platform". Now storing small text messages in the blockchain would still be very expensive but it might be acceptable, especially if you worry a lot about censorship or your message remaining available "forever".
>By default, your data is stored in a dedicated Microsoft Azure Blob. But you can and should connect your Blockstack Browser to your own cloud storage solutions (preferably multiple).
It adds an extra hurdle to developing dapps as well.
So many users in gitter channels I frequent run into problems with gas.
But one thing is amazing is that once your dapp is deployed your backend is fully permanent and replicated 19,000 times [0] (which is both super good and super bad at the same time - no bug fixes in prod).
That’s a big stumbling psychological stumbling block that the “regular” internet doesn’t have.
And I think that fact will shape whether any of us or the regular public ever launch a dapp.
There will be a small set of services I believe which will cross this threshold. Not sure if it will be a large number or not.