[yafujifide]

> If there are no downvotes, does community moderation work? Does this even resemble the Reddit we know of?

This system would not be the same as the reddit of today. Whether moderation would still work - see all my other comments in this thread about flagging. Basically, flagging would serve as downvoting and would be partially effective. Would love to find a better way, but flagging may be good enough.

[goykasi]

Honestly, the more and more I think about this, I just dont think its worth doing with bitcoin. There are too many poisoned coins tied to bad actors. If youve ever worked on a sizable community of forums (and Im pretty sure the "Bitcoin Engineer" for reddit doesnt count), you would know that trolls will troll. Simply because they can, and they will just keep coming back -- bitcoin makes that too easy. All they would need to do is create a new address, account and shift coins around (or tumble them to obfuscate the source).

Lets just think about how many coins have been "stolen". Those are all available to crap all over your p2p blockchain forum. The normal users could never compete. So now, not only do you have to maintain enough hashing power (as suggested above), now you need to maintain a sizable wallet of btc that can outspend a thief's reserve of coins. Just so your users can post on a decentralized forum network? Sounds like a losing battle. Good luck.

[rlpb]

> Lets just think about how many coins have been "stolen". Those are all available to crap all over your p2p blockchain forum.

In a Bitcoin economy those are also available to spend on useful things, just like money. Put it this way: would rich trolls spend significant cash to troll you? I don't think so - they'd buy valuable things with their money for themselves instead.

[geofft]

"Troll" is an ambiguous wprd here. The question is whether anyone would spend significant amounts of money to control what gets upvoted and what doesn't. Given Reddit's recent $50M round, I'm hesitant to say the answer is no.