How is spam and abuse handled in this system?
Edit: If you look at the github issues, I have a couple of features queued up for dealing with abuse.
maybe a second threshold value that can only interact with each other(they won't be visible to people who set their threshold to above the value that they own) ie the poor can interact with the poor
only the rich can talk to the rich and the poor can only talk to the poor but the poor are allowed to look at the rich and verify that they themselves are indeed poor. the poor can collaborate with each other or incentivise the rich to "pay" them.
trust flows just like centralised social networks because it's easier to do than play whackamole with low value easily created bots/spammers.any bots who abuse these systems and rise to positions of visibility are considered high value bot networks(since they somehow managed to get enough "value" to exist in the system either by using random meme based content generation or other abusive but entertaining tactics for eg r/subredditsimulator ). these bots could then be easily de-valued by users with very high values( the super rich-the core developers/influencers) if they irritate their audiences too much.
You can make spam expensive by using a proof-of-work system like HashCash ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash ), which is the idea that inspired mining. HashCash adds proof-of-work to a message, which is specific to that message. The receiver verifies the proof then discards it. There's no datastructure to maintain, no consensus required, no need to involve anyone other than the sender and receiver, etc.
HashCash didn't catch on for email, since its 'fire and forget' nature prevented senders and receivers from negotiating a non-zero amount of work. Such problems can be avoided in this kind of real-time protocol: just add an extra step to ask the receiver how much work it requires, then do the work, then send the message.
With such a negotiation layer, there's no need for every message to require the same amount of work. You could receive the message without hashcash, and reply with a cost based on how spammy it looks.
Everyone would be free to implement this however they like: give a high cost to everyone; check senders against public blacklists; give a whitelist of 'friends' a lower cost; reduce the cost if we've previously 'liked'/'followed'/etc. the sender; look up the sender in a pagerank/web-of-trust/friend-of-a-friend/etc. database; use a spam filter to score the message content; etc.