You could use Bitcoin OP_RETURN to store censorship resistant, global broadcast messages. It has *many* disadvantages, and I don’t recommend doing that for most use cases. But the fact that you can is proof by construction that it is possible to have a censorship-resistant global broadcast network, that is completely trustless, and fair — in the sense that everyone has a shot at broadcasting a message proportional to resources spent. In fact if you remove individual transactions and treat each block as a message, it is quite perfectly fair and very hard to censor — as long as there’s a honest majority of hash rate. “But it doesn’t scale!l” yes it doesn’t scale very well — but even at one message every ten minutes, a PoW chain of messages would already offer a lot of value. But the main problem of scale here is that a PoW chain or “blockchain” was designed to offer a number of guarantees that are really expensive but essential for financial use cases. Namely: strict immutable ordering, retaining records for indeterminate amounts of time, not having any liveness assumptions. Those aren’t needed for broadcast communication in general. It is my belief that other data structures are possible that preserve important properties of “blockchains” while being cheaper and obtaining higher bandwidth by giving up guarantees that aren’t relevant. In the near future I will publish one, after working a bit more on a PoC . I want to be sure it works first.

I’m old enough to remember a time when There were no “likes” No reposts No follows Everybody had their own blog. People switched “platforms” quite easily. You could read your favourite blogs in an RSS client app of your choosing. Nobody got “cancelled” for wrongthink. Nobody was worried about misinformation. You could find all kind of crazy stuff on Google and nobody thought that was “unsafe” much less a matter of national security. Why did we go from that world to this one? How? If we are kinda starting over again, how do we prevent it from happening again?

How long until malicious relay + impersonation + asking for zaps and personal info phishing scams? If people aren’t yet using malicious relays to impersonate jack and jb55 to ask for zaps then its still very early 😂