The Cost of Transactions on Ethereum and what it means

Once upon a time I was a professional developer and I have continued with the occasional side product. So, when I saw all the hype about Ethereum and smart contracts, I thought I would delve into it to see if there was any niche I could play in.

I came up with ideas and started to outline an Question / Answer community. Then I started to research how much it would cost to run the application and then I had to shelve that particular idea.

There is an interesting chart at https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-transactionfees.html which shows that the average transaction fee on Ethereum is over $1.

There is also this discussion on stackexchange - https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/7842/storing-document-file-in-blockchain which suggests that the cost of storing information in, and reading information from, Ethereum could cost a small fortune.

This essentially rules out a whole set of use cases for that blockchain and makes anything that requires regular continual transactions unworkable unless high value is involved. Looking around, there does not seem to be any smart contract blockchain which could work for microtransactions. There is the possible exception of NEM once it introduces reduced fees in a few weeks but the tools are a bit limiting. There is also the concept of state channels floating about but I have not found an actual implementation.

So does these mean that the only viable apps for blockchain based smart contracts at present are high value apps dealing with financial transactions, token offerings, high value registries and non-trival voting?

Of course, if an organisation does manage to get a sizable stake in the financial transactions space then that will justify some high valuations but with several smart contract blockchains being launched it is hard to predict what will win and what will die. It may also be worth considering that the people who control the worlds finances are very aware of the potential disruption and will still want to be the ones in control when everything shakes out.