As a long time follower of the project, the recent months have been absolutely fantastic with the release of the SDK and the constant stream of new versions and features, but I feel like one important part has been missing from the discussion, namely economics.
I know that dfinity sees itself more as a decentralised cloud provider than a blockchain, but a core characteristic of the network will be that the payment for compute power on this network will happen through some token. Anyone who is going to build a serieus application on dfinity will want to know the cost structures involved. But at this moment there is almost no information around this aspect of dfinity. Here are some questions that come to mind:
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With regards to storage, will you have to pay some sort of rent or will it be a one time fee. I almost can’t imagine the second option giving ethereums growing state problem and if it is the first options what happens to your data if you forget to pay the “rent”.
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What will be different costs of write and read operations on the network. What would be the cost if I would want to host a completely static website.
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Do people have to pay gas to make a transaction on the network like with ethereum?
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Will a future release of motoko contain functions for moving around and programming with DFN? So far we have seen nothing around programming with tokens, which might be one of the most interesting usecase in the beginning as something which you could only do with dfinity as opposed to AWS.
I also think there are other important questions which are still unanswered like are there any regulations dfinity will be considering in the structure of the network like CCPA or GDPR or what if somebody does something illegal on the network?
I’m loving the releases of technical content that seem to be ramping up lately but the technical side isn’t the only important factor in making dfinity a succes. Most code is written in service of a business and a serious business will want to have a clear picture of the costs and legal implications involved when choosing dfinity as their cloud provider. I’m very curious what will be the answers to these questions in te coming period.