Data Signing Instead of TX Signing
You've heard right, it is now possible to peep completely for free on Peepeth - the Twitter clone running as an Ethereum dApp with the help of IPFS. The original idea came from one of the early users Andrew B. Coathup who wrote an article on Medium about the evolution of decentralised social media platforms.
The Idea
The basic idea is pretty simple, yet genius if implemented correctly. Since now, every user had to pay the GAS fees for their batches of actions. A batch is an aggregation of actions that is temporarily saved on a centralised server until it is immortalised on the blockchain. Even if the GAS cost remains pretty low (it was possible to use Peepeth quite some time with just 1$ worth of ETH) it is a turn-off for many people. Why would I pay for something I could do for free? They said... Unstoppable and un-censorable decentralised social media was the answer. The problem is that the average Joe doesn't care about the fact that it could be censorable or is centralised. The average Joe wants a service that works well and is user friendly. As few as technical requirements as possible. So how about moving the batch saving to the centralised front-end and let the user only sign it's own actions? That's the basic idea Andrew Coathup suggested.
The Peepeth front-end hosted on peepeth.com is now paying the GAS fees to save the users batches and all the user has to do is to sign the data to prove ownership. Quite convenient, isn't it? But who's going to pay the GAS price for all these batches? The front-end creator didn't got infinite money, right? You'll ask me... That's true, and there are ways to solve this. Andrew Coathup suggests mainly two ways: the dApp owner pays/funds it or the user could pay a one time fee or subscription. Personally I think that the second option is against the main goal of this payment shift. Why would the user pay a one time fee or subscription if the goal was to avoid paying fees? Andrew Coathup suggested that this could be done through tokens, and this is the idea I had while reading his article. Why wouldn't peepeth.com become a verified publisher of the Basic Attention Token? This would close the circle and make it completely free for the front-end owner and the user. Users of the Brave browser get $BAT while browsing the web and selling their attention to ads, they will redistribute these tokens to their favourite content creators and websites (including peepeth.com), the front-end gets these tokens and use these earnings to pay for hosting and transaction GAS fees. So who's paying the price at the end? The people that buy your attention when browsing the web on an every day basis.
What are the advantages of this method?
- The user can now use Peepeth completely for free (You need at least 100 peeps and a 10 days old account)
- Actions aren't blocked by pending transaction anymore, once you signed your batch you can continue using Peepeth without delay
More Information:
Peepeth Explanation - Data Signing Instead of TX Signing
Peepeth About Section - General Information About How Peepeth Works