> In an age where platforms pay you for your content
Posting rewards the user with platform tokens. Upvoting also acts as tipping the author of the post. The economics are not 100% figured out, but I am convinced there is a way for these micro-payments to work and create a self-sustaining platform.
> 4 seconds is an eternity in the modern web
I disagree, but I think this is mostly a UI issue. You can have optimistic updates on the frontend while the transaction is confirming and make it feel exactly like a web2 site. I’ve worked on applications with similar latency pretty recently and the solution is often just to add more caching layers to make it feel fast and snappy for the user.
There are indeed trade-offs, and I'm aware that most people would prefer to post for free. However, I believe the 100% free model is not sustainable, and it's worth experimenting with different approaches. Companies providing these types of services tend to become hostile towards their users over time in order to pay their bills, resorting to selling personal data, holding user-generated content hostage, or cluttering their websites with ads.
Charging a small transaction fee to the user might also have some advantages: it discourages spam and encourages more thoughtful posting. And we're talking about an amount that is trivial for most users.
Regarding speed, Algorand provides transaction finality in under 4 seconds, which is one of the main reasons I believe it's a good fit for this project. Creating a post or comment is a bit slower than posting on Hacker News, but it still feels pretty fast.
As for scalability, I'd say let's cross that bridge when we get there. Currently, Metapost is only publishing text posts to the blockchain. Hosting things like images or videos would be better suited for IPFS, with only the links being published on the chain.
It is easy to sell your Monero for fiat anonymously using a service like localmonero.co
There is also a growing parallel economy where you can buy goods and services directly with your Monero and avoid selling anything for fiat. For example, I have bought domain names using XMR on nja.la.
The cryptographic keys were stored on a cloud storage device. Law enforcement agencies gained access to these keys while executing a search warrant and used them move the funds. So by this logic, the government is now the rightful owner of these funds.