Show HN: Decentralised Twitter – Microblogging on the Ethereum Blockchain | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Decentralised Twitter – Microblogging on the Ethereum Blockchain

github.com

63 pointsyep17119 comments

See also something similar using Bitcoin: http://eternitywall.it/

How big will the blockchain become? I have not read much about Ethereum and not a deep understanding of every technical aspect regarding blockchains, however I understand that most applications just are not practical with endlessly growing blockchains. Does Ethereum a solution for that?

One needn't store the data on blockchains, just a hash to it, or even a hash of many data blocks' hashes, etc.

Well, someone has to store and transmit the actual content at some point, and for real twitter there's a total volume of 400 million tweets a day...

They are calling this the 'scalability problem' and are researching it as well. I think the general idea is to divide the blockchain into shards with some links in between.

besides payment how's this different than this http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.7152v1.pdf https://github.com/miguelfreitas/twister-html

The payment aspect is what ensures that a big distributed network will actually store and serve your tweets.

Any single given application on Ethereum (except straight-up value transfer as seen in Bitcoin) isn't compelling enough to have its own network, but together they are.

What language are the .sol files written in?

I have never seen that file extension before, but the language looks to be C-derived.

It's for Solidity, a language created by the Ethereum folks for writing smart contracts.

https://ethereum.github.io/solidity/

https://solidity.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

Interesting concept, not sure I'd want to pay per tweet though, even 1/3rd of a cent..

Yes, sure, having to pay for each tweet is a drawback compared to the commercial version of Twitter.

Please note there's a donation mechanism [1].

If others like what you write, there's a chance you can get back some of the money you spent on tweeting ;)

Still, using blockchain technology has positive aspects, like some kind of censorship resistance. That is, if some country is going to block access to Twitter again: who knows, can this be an alternative? Not saying access to the ethereum network can't be blocked at all, though.

[1] https://github.com/yep/eth-tweet/blob/master/TweetAccount.so...

I think it would be decent tradeoff to not be spammed and datamined (although datamining certainly is possible as it is an open system).

I would love to see Twitter adopt this. Any tweet with an external link - you must pay 1/3 cent. Let's see which tweets you really deem important to tweet!

What about retweets?

It has a link. Pay the toll.

how do you determine what things are a link in a way that can't be easily evaded?

How big would be a standalone binary for this ?

Can't be too big! That could be a great project, perhaps an easy entrance for many into Ethereum technologies.

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