The biggest barrier for a layman to use blockstack that I currently see is the cost behind registering an ID.
As far as I’m aware, from the multiplayer tutorial, you cannot use custom storage or do multiplayer services without an id. Is there any plan or workaround to allow this to work for people who don’t want to spend $ to use the service?
I think that if this problem was fixed, we could get a lot more people interested in the idea and actually using it.
The reason I ask this is that I’m trying to do a Design project using it, but can’t justify all the benefits it brings if the end-user has to spend money in order to use it.
Subdomain registrations are going to be one of the methods (if not the primary method) to alleviate this user on-boarding cost.
You can already register for a username under the subdomain “name.stealthy.id” if you don’t want to pay to register your name under the “name.id” scheme.
This, however, requires the subdomain owner to pay the fees still right?
I think that paying btc to make ids makes sense. So I think that there is value in not restricting some of the most important APIs (multi player storage) to just users or companies that can afford the cost.
Is there any possibility of this in the future, or is it just a byproduct of how blockstack has to work?
Yes, the owner of the domain would have to pay a fee to register the subdomain on the BTC blockchain. But I’d say there’s also benefits to building on Blockstack in that you don’t have to worry about storing user data. So while there might be a cost with registering the name–I believe that cost is actually much cheaper since your creating usernames under your sub-domain–there is an added cost benefit in other areas.
I did the math once. If you register the maximum number of subdomains per Bitcoin transaction, each one costs about $0.005 USD. Unlike on-chain names, subdomains last forever and do not need to be renewed. Also, we just shipped instantaneous subdomain registration, so users can sign up for a subdomain and start using it immediately without waiting for the transaction to confirm
