lol, you think i don't know about these things intimately, it's my work

just got notified yesterday that ICP is now adding gateways, and there is a list of about 30 on the configuration being provided

and i'm extremely skeptical about arweave and i am actually working with it... been designing data structures for a social network aggregator

the gateways are just caching proxies, much like the edges of cloudflare's DDoS protection system, it's to shift work away from authoritative replicas

and the reason why these "cryptos" need these things is that there is no incentive to run a non-authoritative replica, unlike with bitcoin, where the incentives are privacy and reliability for your payment infrastructure

the fact that payment/transfer use case is so minimally useful and not valuable to these networks is the biggest red flag that they don't survive once the marketing engine slows down 

 you're correct that just pure AR has no incentive to run gateways.  That's why ar.io is now doing a system to pay gateways to run them, coming from the profits of those who buy DNS and update it. 

It's unclear what your point is, that we should all just use cloudflare?  There is no Bitcoin binding contract