The costs are and will be neglible - right now 12 months of ‘coretime’ in Kusama costs approx $1 so this is not a problem.
When coretime eventually launches, even if costs are set higher than this, demand will demonstrate this resource as essentially free, no matter how many times people talk about ‘quality’ or ‘flexibility’.
Kusama is exactly the same incentive structure as Polkadot, so despite the branding, sense of scale and diffference in valuations/treasuries, they share the same futures - its just reality has hit Kusama sooner.
So I would turn your attention not to the costs, but to the essential demand drivers, since the whole system steadily collapses in on itself without successful Blockspace Products and Mechanisms in Polkadot as they are currently defined/discussed.
In this regard it is inevitable that network treasuries will need to bootstrap demand for blockspace by betting on teams who can acquire this resource for pretty much nothing, and then refine it in such a way that it has a much higher value.
If one team acquires a resource for $1 and then makes it worth $1m using a repeatable process, this will in turn demonstrate a price arbitrage opportunity that will in time create demand pressure on the network token, since there is clearly a good business opportunity.
In time it will become accepted wisdom for treasury proposals to be directly focused on bootstrapping coretime demand, with success measured objectively based on the ability to resell for a higher price, which opens the door to understanding spending effectiveness at a fundamental level.
https://twitter.com/monsieurbulb/status/1700047821599023352?s=20
This will be structured in a new form that blends much of what Shawn notes above, since these are just current examples of experiments to date, taking the best of each design to more effectively align core incentives.
Buy low, sell high - there is nothing new under the sun, just the business fundamentals of these networks are obscured by the massive over-valuations due to unregulated speculation.
Crypto often feels like an exaggerated version of the same infrastructure supply glut seen in the launch of cable and satellite communications which ultimately paved the way for world famous media networks like HBO, ESPN and MTV that were enabled by the 0 marginal cost of launching a new network internationally.
See The Rise and Fall of ESPN’s leverage which is worth a read.
I can still remember the conversation. Bill said, “Let me get this straight. You mean to tell me, for no extra money — for no extra money! — we could take this signal and beam it anywhere in the country?” And I said, “That’s right.” And then he asked again, “Anywhere in the country?” And I said, “Anywhere.” I remember we went back and forth like this a couple times. Bill and Scott were looking at each other, and they might have been getting sexually excited, I’m not sure. But I can tell that they were very, very excited.
You don’t have to stretch the analogy too far to see these networks through the same media distribution opportunity lens since they are effectively unbounded in their ability to reach supra-nationally and hyper-locally.
I would also highly recommend Tim Wu’s The Master Switch, The Rise and Fall of Information Empires related to these same points. It’s the best book on media and distribution I’ve read - and it seems highly likely blockchains are a new subset of media.