Oddbean

Are you sure you're not mixing up ICP and AO (arweave's "super computer")? As far as I understand, this is renting the nodes out to run code. The nodes are different then the gateways. https://ao.arweave.dev/ This should not change the speed of gateways, and if it did from extra traffic, then more gateways would come on with all the extra revenue the service is doing to the coin(s) value(s). Arweave uses modified BitTorrent as part of it's "Proof of Access" system to share among nodes. But the gateways serve it to the end-consumer using regular https in a regular web browser.

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