I was hoping for a roughly low barrier of entry, rather than try to figure out who will trade USB for ETH, as I have no BTC.

In all honesty, I'm looking at distributed applications as well, which from what I read Ethereum says it does and doesn't do. It's a bit fast and loose from what I read about, about Ethereum's capabilities.

I'll go back to my experimenting with TOR and how it might be possible to make your own distributed applications within the Hidden Services. That's free to use, and as low bar as I can think of. (Add machine, shows up as HS.)