My contributions to Twister are relatively minor- mostly focused towards UI/UX stuff, something I personally loathe, but figured it'd be good learning. Also, ou

My contributions to Twister are relatively minor- mostly focused towards UI/UX stuff, something I personally loathe, but figured it'd be good learning. Also, out of all projects that itch for a nail to smash with the Bitcoin hammer, it's one of the few that make the most sense to me. The reasoning to use a Bitcoin-based protocol for the auth layer is detailed in the whitepaper [1] but it's basically in order to have unique identities tied to a given username while still remaining decentralized. Just like with Bitcoin, there's Proof of Work needed to perform these validations, but instead of getting paid in coin, whoever finds a block has a chance to get a given message promoted for people to find more easily on their client. Does it scale? I'm not sure myself, it's working pretty well right now, but it certainly scales way better than using Bitcoin for every damn thing. In theory, you could use different protocols to those the original developer chose for all three layers since they're mostly independent (the user registration/auth layer, the DHT layer for messages themselves and the BitTorrent swarm layer for distribution and notification) [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.7152 https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.7152