I originally wrote this post as a response to Osmode, but it ended up swelling more than I&#x27;d intended.  I fundamentally agree with his goals of supporting free discussion and suppressing self-censorship.  However, I see several problems with this approach to achieving those goals.<p>The core problem with social-capital type schemes like Reddit (or indeed HN) is that they&#x27;re very susceptible to bandwagoning.  On Reddit the groupthink varies by community, but there&#x27;s some mixing bowls and as a result the community does have an overall balance, despite having some short-term bandwagons.  HN has a really strong bent towards the opinions of 20-something Silicon Valley startup coders without much counterbalance, and I know that I&#x27;ve certainly self-censored on certain topics that go against the grain here.  Yes, in the words of Drew Carry, &quot;everything is made up and the points don&#x27;t matter&quot;, but then why is there still a counter in the corner of my screen?<p>Here, you&#x27;re literally talking about putting a pricetag on dissenting opinions.  If you go against the grain you&#x27;re not just getting downvoted, each post actually costs you a certain amount of real money on servicing the blockchain.  Conversely, circlejerking will get you a lot of kudos.  That is - in and of itself - a strong social pressure that hampers the full spectrum of discourse.  Much like the Bitcoin blockchain, it is fundamentally based on the assumption that no one group controls a non-trivial portion of the [social] network.<p>The same mechanisms that work against reprisal or spam also work against opinions that dissent from the common wisdom.  It&#x27;s vitally important for a strong discourse that sometimes-unpopular opinions be heard.  Otherwise it&#x27;s far too easy for the majority to carry themselves along (the Iraq war immediately springs to mind).  I don&#x27;t know how you counterbalance that against suppressing actual spam - because botnets and such mean that those groups will also have a great deal of capital from blockchain&#x2F;network operation.<p>Some of the best communities on the web have actually been gated ones.  Back in the day it cost $10 to activate an account on SomethingAwful.  If you trolled, well, at least you&#x27;re helping pay for the servers.  If you leech on private trackers, you get banned and someone else takes a hit for inviting you.  Gated NZB sites work in a similar way.  I don&#x27;t have a problem with such communities at all, but fundamentally they work on the basis of clearly defined social standards.  On the flip side, Twitter and Tumblr have a very low level of discourse, because it&#x27;s all about pithy soundbytes that get you retweeted.  People leech from ThePirateBay all the time, because from their perspective, why not?<p>I don&#x27;t see how this is different from &quot;twitter, but using bitcoin&quot;.  Something like FreeNet seems to accomplish the above goals much more effectively - popular opinions result in distributed re-caching, unpopular ones still get served if they have sufficient traffic, and <i>really</i> unpopular ones can be broadcasted by vigorous network participation and re-seeding.