Who earns ETH from providing ressources allowing dApps to run?

Question

I am trying to better understand how the ethereum network works but I didn't find a clear answer to that question yet.

• I understand that ETH can be "used to pay for the computations that you ask the network to perform". I guess those computations performed by the network are another name for decentralized apps running.

• Also, I read that running "a full node [...] won't get any ether reward.".

If I am correct, the two points above imply that resources allowing dApps to run are not provided by full nodes. They are not provided by miners either (miners just submit hashes in order to validate transactions AFAIK). So concretely where do dApps run, and who gets ETH for that? Can I do it?

Answer 1

Whatever your transaction is (calling a function on a contract, deploying a contract, or simply sending a payment), you have to pay gas for it.

Who are spending their computing power to run your transaction?

Before the TX is put in a block, every miner spends their computing power to run your TX. Once your TX arrives in the txpool, miners would grab it, check if it's valid, run it through, get the output, and attempt to put it in a block. (This is where the proof-of-work comes in)

Once it is in a block, every full node must validate the blocks they hear on the P2P network before accepting it. Part of the validation process requires running every single TX and comparing it against the output they see in the published block. If they match, the block is accepted by the node.

So in summary: every blockchain participant (miners + full nodes) eventually spends their computing power to run your TX.

Who's getting the payout (your tx fee)?

Only the miner who successfully finds the block that includes your TX gets your TX fee.

Bitcoin works the same way.

Answer 2

where do dApps run, and who gets ETH for that?

It's important to understand that every node keeps an exact copy of the same Ethereum Blockchain, ledger and that everything in Ethereum is designed to be deterministic.

In order for a node to remain in-sync with the rest of the Ethereum network, they must see the same transactions as the rest of the network and execute these deterministic transactions at around the same times as the rest of the nodes on the network.

What this means that every node* when it receives a new, latest & valid block is processing every transaction (balance transfer, every smart contract function call etc.) to apply these changes to their local copy of the Blockchain..

Only the miners, however, are receiving the block reward and the transaction fees included in every, successfully integrated block.

A great thing about Ethereum is that it is an open, public network - you may run a node and participate in the network operation. You can even set your node to try mining a new block; without a substantial amount of hashing power, it is unlikely that you would be able to mine a block on the main network though.

Bonus, extended answer

I like to think of a Dapp (decentralised application) as more than just the, Ethereum, smart contracts - @Eth provides a very good overview of what a Dapp is:

A DApp can have frontend code and user interfaces written in any language (just like an app) that can make calls to its [Ethereum smart contract] backend. Furthermore, its frontend can be hosted on decentralized storage such as Swarm or IPFS.

In the case of the front-end code be hosted by a decentralised file system such as Swarm, Storj etc. then there are other nodes providing resources (in this case file storage) and receiving payment in Ether or tokens for this service.

Depending on the complexity of your DApp, it may also need to provide an incentive mechanism to operate in a truly decentralised manner. For example, BTC Relay requires - and incentivises - Bitcoin block headers to be submitted to a contract:

Relayers are those who submit block headers to BTC Relay. To incentivize the community to be relayers, and thus allow BTC Relay to be autonomous and up-to-date with the Bitcoin blockchain, Relayers can submit block headers to BTC Relay. When any transaction is verified in the block, or the header is retrieved, Relayers will be rewarded a fee

Answer 3

After researching on this, I think the actual answer is that dapps will rely on something like iExec to provide them the necessary computing resources. So payments/earnings actually won't be in ETH but in tokens such as RLC.

Gas is just a nickname for the cost (paid in ETH) of a transaction. For example, when sending Ether, a small portion of your ETH balance is used. The miners pick up that "gas" (ether) as a transaction fee. That is a different topic than "where do dApps run", which was the question.