This is the issue. I really don’t want to get into being forced by sheer crowd pressure to introduce a native token right now, BUT I am as keen as anyone for this.
I have (and I being me have much less authority that anyone to make this happen, and I seriously mean I will fight to not have that authority or power as it’s very very bad) been muling over this and here is what I currently feel (current is this second, I am all over the place brainstorming here).
(assuming bugs are fixed we know about in upload)
- Currently we can easily have a client side currency.
- The currency requires storing data, so currently requires ETH etc. which is a hard barrier to speed (and cost)
So I am trying to figure out a mechanism that avoids changing antnode code itself to do this. Otherwise we need to have a data type that is free and with all the focus on us now, this type will be abused to absolute hell with folk just uploading billions of fake transactions per hour, flooding the network and damaging it. Many community members will create scripts to “prove” the transactions are good and free and … and so on.
So this is quite difficult to balance out, not that any of this means going free native first would have been any better. It’s just interesting as we we how fast this could grow but also with it will come threats to a relatively smallish network (even at 100million nodes) could come from supporters and attackers all working together in unison 
There will be. vary clever and simple answer, but even mentioning native gets everyone saying we need it yesterday, the network is not real without it and w must must do this right now and so on. So it’s like trying to share some info and brainstorm in no mans land in a huge firefight Not simple