> I'm really glad they cancelled the project if that is what you were hired for.

The idea sketched out here is not equivalent to the project I was hired for. That project was never sketched out in detail and probably would not have involved bitcoin.

> 1) I'd say about 10% of the reddit user base even knows what bitcoin is, and far less have any. I don't see people willing to acquire bitcoin just to participate.

Today, most reddit users would not participate in this system. But we don't need 100 million users on Day 1.

> 2) At some point you have to host the content on a computer somewhere. Time on computers costs money. In the case of reddit, this is 1000s of dollars a day (and would be even more in a decentralized system due to the overhead of coordination). Right now the bitcoin economy is not robust enough to extract 1000s of dollars a day, and there isn't any provider that will accept bitcoin in exchange for compute at that level, or even close to it.

Yep. Probably the best way to do this is to found a company that hosts servers that host a lot of the content. Anybody could do this, of course, and the company's servers are not privileged in any way. However, by being the first and best service provider on a new decentralized platform, they would profit (I call this business plan the "Satoshi model"). Note how in the article I explain that the users actually pay to download content - a possibility that was not available when reddit was founded.

> 3) Fewer and fewer people have the ability to host content anymore, be it at home or in a datacenter. So you'd be relying on just a few people who would be willing to host content. This basically leaves you very open to an "attack" on the network by a bad actor, who could take it over with reltive ease if they were just one of a few that were hosting content.

Think of the hosters as being more like bitcoin miners or bitcoin full nodes. Anyone can do it, technically, but almost no one bothers to. The people that do make a business out of it.

> 4) Child porn. It would be way too easy for someone to put that on the network and then everyone would be at risk, further reducing the number of people willing to host (see the list of Tor exit nodes that aren't government spy nodes as an example of how few people would be willing to participate).

Don't host content you don't agree with. There could even be a flagging system for stuff like this so that you never download it in the first place where possible.

> 5) Related to number 4, the laws in different countries are different. If I host in the USA and you host in say Sweden, content that is legal for you may not be legal for me, again opening me up to liability unless I closely police the content, and unlike reddit Inc, I don't have the lawyers and common carrier protections.

Yes. As I said, you do not have to host content you don't like (but you also can't prevent other people from hosting/sending whatever they want to other people).

> Like I said, I'd love to be proven wrong, but given my experience actually running reddit, I just don't think the bitcoin ecosystem is big enough to support it today or even in the medium future.

The bitcoin ecosystem is not mature enough to be as big as reddit today, but it is big enough to be as big as reddit on reddit's Day 1, or maybe reddit's Day 365 or so. This system and bitcoin could grow to ultimately be as large as reddit is today or larger, in 10 or so years (in a hypothetical best-case scenario).