You have to pay for bandwidth, CDNs, storage, app servers, DB servers, etc etc.
Decentralized serving has just as much bandwidth, storage, and iron (if not more). Does it somehow make those resources cheaper?
Decentralized serving has just as much bandwidth, storage, and iron (if not more). Does it somehow make those resources cheaper?
For example, in 2016 a friend of mine and I made an electron app called WebTorrent Desktop. It has over a million downloads. The total bandwidth transfer so far is probably a lot--wild guess, maybe a few million dollars worth?
But it is free and open source and costs roughly $0 to run--just enough to keep the website up. That's the magic of decentralization--you're simply writing software. You're not running a service.
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Consider the total monthly internet bill of all Twitter users combined. Extremely rough guess, 500 mil montly actives * $40/mo for Comcast or something = $20b per month.
The crowd has more than enough bandwidth, disk space, and CPU cycles to run services at any scale. That's another magical aspect of dapps: the total resources available to the system automatically scale with the number of users. It's up to us to figure out how to harness it.