As it presently stands, the Bitcoin protocol only allows for 40bytes of arbitrary data to be added to the blockchain (reluctantly, for many) via its OP_RETURN operand or modified transaction data.
A transactions is made that cannot be spent containing arbitrary data inside, with a fee attached as incentive for miners.
With this system, it makes something like a Social Network very difficult to construct on the Bitcoin blockchain. I'm wondering what sorts of things are possible with Ethereum for social networking given that the blockchain of Ethereum is more mature, flexible and better suited to just about everything than the Bitcoin blockchain (which is looking more like a dinosaur every passing second).
I cant stop reading about ETH, so if you have articles or links please provide them. I'm still building a knowledge of ETH, so please excuse my lack of knowledge if I'm off the mark in any way.
Cheers,
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If I were to run a social network on top of Ethereum, I would do it like this:
The actual data for the network (personal information, pictures etc) would be stored off chain using a decentralised p2p file storage system like Ethereum's own Swarm or Filecoin. This would save greatly on costs, but still allow for a large degree of decentralisation in regard to the data.
You would then use contracts added onto Ethereum's blockchain to pull this data together in a meaningful way to be seen as a social networking page. For instance, you might create a name registration Dapp to help people generate their own personal addresses, another to track where the page's data is stored, another to help people search for other people using the network and so on and so forth.
For further reading, check out MEOH (a social network proposed earlier on this summer to be built on top of Ethereum), as well as this Reddit post.
Of course this idea sort-of uses auditable blocks, and challenges+the dynamics of the thing for auditability. Tbh i dont feel sure about it, and comments are a level lower in value. Depends on what it is about though! And if there is "karma", some data-missing-invalid blocks could mess things up longer term.
https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/issues/1259
until i discovered ethereum. This platform seems to suit much better.