I hate the way the cryptocurrency world has sucked all the air out of the decentralized room. Why does a decentralized app have to interact with a smart contract? We already have tons that do not. Why does it need a coin?
Turns out the best way to manage spam in a global decentralized network with no gatekeepers is assigning a monetary cost to actions.
The notion that the concept of money itself is dirty is an antiquated one. If you're not trading money you're trading time or limiting your scope. No approach is inherently worst than the others, but since the money way is new to decentralized networks that's where the innovation will naturally tend to happen.
But if you really don't like money in your decentralized networks I hear the GUN[1] ecosystem is pretty active. In-between solutions like Mastodon[2] are also blooming. And if you follow Ethereum's "leader" Vitalik Buterin on Twitter, you'll see he himself is very supportive of alternative approaches that don't involve cryptocurrency[3].
I've had an Ethereum address for 3 years and I just counted around 30 spam tokens attached to it. That's remarkably low considering how global and easy it is to send. I don't even want to imagine how many spam emails an unfiltered address would've gotten in that time span.
I think you're arguing about two different types of decentralization. What the OP seems to want is full-stack decentralization.
You post a bounty in the Etherium world that you want some storage, some compute, a name, an address, etc. and provide some gas so that the network can verify the contracts have actually been fulfilled, and then poof, your site is running somewhere.
Or the simpler case which this is trying to tackle, you want to host a site on IPFS but you don't want to buy an always-on node. Choosing a single provider would be "centralizing" in their eyes so you post a contract for people to seed your site on IPFS and get paid for doing so.
You're saying that "[you] hate the way the cryptocurrency world has sucked all the air out of the decentralized room" but also that "we already have tons [of decentralized apps] that do not [use cryptocurrency]." That seems contradictory.
It's not contradictory. When they say they hate that cryptocurrency has sucked all the air out of the room, they're saying that they hate that nobody is talking about the non-cryptocurrency alternatives, not that they don't exist.
