xavieryvez
a. the developer was not less than polite in handling the situation b. it was not an absolute knee-jerk reaction
I see nothing wrong with how it went down. Storm in a teacup.
No expenses and you can play around all you like. When you want to go live, there is typically only a very small deployment cost.
https://github.com/thelooneyfarm/contracts
In my experience it is not that much of an uphill battle to start, it is quite similar to the stuff devs do in their normal dayjob.
SatoshiDice is not quite the same as a Ethereum app, the former requires the central website to be online and operating whereas the latter would work even when the site is down since the execution is not centralised. Add Rootstock however and the same applies.
Source: Just finished building a couple of "games" on the Ethereum platform, http://the.looney.farm - one is SatoshiDice-like but not one of them needs the website to be up to operate.
Where you are 100% right - there are multiple ways to solve a problem, so to a user there should be no difference between gaming on something like SatoshiDice or something like mine. Central or de-central, the user probably won't care in the longer term. If you transfer value, you can do it on any crypto, however there may just be with a different way of implementing it or going about your business getting it up.
Basically you pay a "gas price" for every opcode executed by the EVM. Clearing a memory address? You pay for it. Setting a value? You pay for it. etc. etc.
(In the above paragraph "you" refers to the "user" sending the transaction)
You really need to think about what you are doing, whether it is allocation, computation, etc. Minimize the number of opcodes and the number of expensive ones at that. To date the contracts are quite simple, although some really interesting things are in the works.