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by detaro 2936 days ago
There's a bunch of these things, regrettably.
1 comments

For example, could you please provide at least 3 (a bunch) examples which are in production?
I don't think there are any 3 that are exactly what you ask about ("chat-on-blockchain thing").

However, from my understanding of Telegram's ICO and "leaked" roadmap, they appear to be doing a decentralized chat the may leverage their own blockchain for some features (identity, tokens etc.).

I think Status.im is another example, but it's currently early access I believe.

My own product, stealthy.im could be another example. The web product is in production. It builds upon blockstack, storing identity and storage pointers in the blockchain.

So that's 3. I could probably list a few more, but again they wouldn't strictly satisfy your precise criteria in one or major ways. I think @jerf's response is really good--for us the "why" of blockchain is in identity and providing a verifiable decentralized storage network through blockstack. The underlying bitcoin blockchain wouldn't be suitable for message storage or sdp handshaking due to latency as another person pointed out.

I don't really keep track of those things, but I can give you two attempts without much searching:

just this week I saw https://adamant.im

There was a thing called "my echo" (which appears to have failed/been cancelled).

Thank you for providing an example. It's not a "bunch" but still. Could you explain why did you use word "regrettably", is it a bad thing these projects exists?
I think @detaro says 'regrettably' because of the distaste many have about ICOs and the hype related to them. However, I too would like to hear from @detaro on this.
Pretty much, yeah: pushing actual messaging over a blockchain is just horribly inefficient and I don't see it being a workable idea, so it seems dishonest to me to widely promote it and collect money for it.

Other related things are fine: e.g. mapping public keys to human-readable identifiers like a nickname is a good match to what a blockchain is good at, I get why people like the idea of cryptocoin-payments in a messenger platform, ... Still leaves the general concern of "does this really need it's own coin with an ICO and hype", but at least the ideas make some sense there.