This is absolutely not true. Gas prices have been floating between 1 and 4 gwei for a while now. An erc20 token tx may cost 150k gas so between .00015 and .0006 ETH per tx. So that's $0.09 to $0.37. A simple ETH tx is 25k gas so about a 1/6 of this. You can check ethgasstation.info for the latest standard and "safe low" gas prices.
No one pays to "convey a message". People pay for advertising to access an audience. As soon as HN started charging to post comments most people would stop posting. If they charged to post a submission the quality of the links would drop through the floor. The idea that HN has enough value that people would pay to comment here (while other free websites exist) is nonsense.
HN comments are free but the platform is owned by YC and YC enforces certain rules as they see fit. In Ethereum there is no owner, but looks like you have to pay for that
The entire value of HN is that it’s owned, guided and actively moderated by YC.
An Ethereum-based alternative would lose that aspect while also costing money and being very slow. I can’t imagine paying for what is effectively negative value.
The test for blockchain “dApps” is this: is someone so desperate to have thing X decentralized that they’ll pay for it in both real money and usability inconvenience? If so, it’s a dApp candidate.
In the real world, the only thing that seems to pass this test is some types of inter-company ledgers.
I'm no saying that HN is bad and Ethereum is good. For one thing, here I am posting on HN, so it's pretty telling :)
I just wanted to highlight the difference and that that HN is not free. It's free as in beer.
As far as inconvenience goes, it's temporary. Give it some time (2-5 years, I'd say) and it's only going to be about paying real money for it.
And if you think that EOS is decentralized, and that it will ever see the light of day, then even paying money won't be a thing for the users as they have a different business model for dApps, where the dApp owner has to stake EOS coins to get a share of EOS network's resources. Which is more similar to existing business model of renting EC2 servers
This is absolutely not true. Gas prices have been floating between 1 and 4 gwei for a while now. An erc20 token tx may cost 150k gas so between .00015 and .0006 ETH per tx. So that's $0.09 to $0.37. A simple ETH tx is 25k gas so about a 1/6 of this. You can check ethgasstation.info for the latest standard and "safe low" gas prices.