> It's not clear to me how a blockchain is used or needed in this application. If what you want is decentralized discussions, a Blockchain per-se isn't a parti

> It's not clear to me how a blockchain is used or needed in this application. If what you want is decentralized discussions, a Blockchain per-se isn't a particularly good match. You would be better off with an individual account being represented as a cryptographically signed chain of blocks (posts) that only the same user (public key) can append to, with special cases for adding edits to version posts. Replies from other users are appended to their own chains with references to the post being replied to provisionally added as metadata to the original. Add in some DHTs, CRDTs, and maybe Hypercore, and you've reinvented the decentralized structure of Usenet for 2022. There are a few extra features you can layer on like Twitter-style blocklists (Usenet called them killfiles), spam filtering, and web-of-trust, but very little here is contingent on DeFi concepts. Conversation is often transactional, but those transactions are not usually monetary. About the only thing that I can think of that might be helped by a monetary transaction is establishing a new account. If it costs $1 to make a new "hello world" root post (no renewals needed), and bad actors are filtered out as spam such that they have to constantly create new accounts, that should pay for keeping the system running rather well. Paying for content can be done slightly out-of-band, for example by posting content in an encrypted form and only subscribers get decryption keys that are posted in private messages. Or the reverse, subscribers get private encrypted versions that are decryptable with their private keys. Most attempts to fold financial transactions semantics into the core of a posts and replies protocol are likely to be ill-advised (and you won't necessarily know which ones until it is too late). There are too many potentially perverse incentives that mirror the arguments for why the result of cryptocurrency hashing functions cannot be something (anything) useful in its own right.