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Comment by csbartus | Hacker News Reader

The single important question about web3 is: will it be free? Can app devs just start building without paying the blockchain / network fee? The same for users; can they just use apps for free?

If not, the question is: do you pay with data, and go free, or do you pay with real money and prices skyrocketing due to endless speculations?

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IMO, pay with money. End of story. Expecting services for free got is into this horrible advertising model that turned us into the product rather than customers. There are people promoting gasless, free to use chains. That model is flawed. Financial incentives is what finally made decentralized networks a real thing. For a good explanation as to where we're going with this, read "Who Owns The Future."

Excluding people without money sounds like the opposite direction the internet should be headed :(

You're forgetting about the part where the same system can provide those people with an income. Excluding people from the global financial system, imo, is the opposite of where we should be headed. The notion of paying people for their contribution to the network, no matter how small, is discussed in "Who Owns The Future"

How do you make money on web3 without the upfront loading of cash into a crypto wallet?

In the existing state of things, you can get involved in a community that "air drops" a token, you can run a network node, you can play a P2E game, or you can sell NFTs that don't mint until sold. But this is super early. "Who Owns The Future" describes a model of revenue sharing that will require extremely cheap micro transactions.

This is where all blows up. Where there is absolutely no free tier. That won't be digested outside the crypto community.

I see web3 / crypto is a playground for few, with their rules / utopia, but let's just call it crypto, not web3. Web3 should be universal and free, as its predecessors.

It sounds to me like what you are suggesting would be taking the awful inequality we're already suffering and would transpose it to the web. Why would we want that?

You can't provide services for free without exploiting people. I recommend reading "Who Owns The Future" for a for discussion on inclusion.

Doesn't need to be free. Could be public and tax-funded.

App devs can build any app they want on top of these web3 protocols, but their apps may have to pay a fee to interact with those protocols. The fee incentivizes the actors that host (run nodes for) the protocol. That fee may or may not be passed on to users. It's a bit like paying a microtransaction for certain HTTP requests. The amount of times that a user has to pay a fee can be minimized through various pieces of technology like rollups (read about zk rollups and optimistic rollups if you're curious).

And second, will it be easy?

Everyone forgot the key to HTML / blogs / youtube / social media was anyone could join and start doing stuff on a Sunday afternoon.

The author has a famous quote: in the future you’ll have to pay to work. His partner Albert is pushing for the universal basic income. This pictures me a future: a playground for those who willing to pay to work, for the rich, for those pursuing wealth. The rest should rely on the UBI.

I’m ok with that. A win-win for both sides. But let’s finally put the cards on the table.

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