[networked]

Here's an idea: to reap the benefit of anonymity but also to discourage the trolling that comes with it how about an anonymous BBS where you pay (anonymously and in some currency that people don't particularly mind parting with -- e.g., Dogecoin) to post?

[forgottenpass]

Then the rich enough are free to continue posting whatever they want, the poor are discouraged from posting anything at all and everyone else has to justify paying money to communicate with strangers on the internet that don't care what they have to say anyway.

[networked]

>everyone else has to justify paying money to communicate with strangers on the internet that don't care what they have to say anyway

I think many people would pay to post on an anonymous equivalent of Hacker News. Of course, the question is how you bootstrap such a community.

A more straightforward alternative (which would benefit the poor posters the most) is to offer compensation to the posters through, say, the encouragement of tipping for good posts or some sort of a redistribution mechanism [1]. I wonder how this would affect the natural self-regulation of an anonymous community in what people choose to post. One could say that it would encourage the posting of popular opinions but I think that in most anonymous communities that already happens through other means.

Another, more out-there, idea would be to algorithmically grade the posts and assign a price to each. A long, thought-post post would cost you nothing while a post consisting of just "lol" would cost a lot.

[1] E.g., a voting-based system where everyone pays to post and then whoever paid can upvote other posts in the thread. The money is redistributed among the posters in proportion to the number of votes they got once the thread no longer accepts new posts. Try to come up with exploits for this system and ways of mitigating them.

[pavel_lishin]

Haven't there been case studies showing that it's possible to deanonymize Bit/Dogecoin transactions? Since the blockchain records all transactions, one slip-up could lead to your identity being discovered.

[networked]

What I have in mind here is the kind of social anonymity discussed in the article, not the more rigorous kind of anonymity offered by Tor.

On the technical side, I supposed you'd have a central recipient of $anycoin on the BBS server that would authorize a user to post when it received a given amount of $anycoin from that user. Other posters could possibly exploit this by trying to correlate the time on someone's posts with the transactions on the blockchain to find out what "wallet"/address is behind the posts. Perhaps this could be mitigated by the server introducing noise to the displayed time. I'm not sure how important this is to anonymity of the non-technical kind (one where you could subpoena the access logs from the website the discussion takes place on and where people routinely click on links).