That is a great idea--it's funny because I was thinking along similar lines where bitcoin has the blockchain and maybe a similar scheme could be used to have a central, p2p verified stream/history of tweets.
I was thinking the downside would be that the blockchain would end up being HUGE if it got even 5% of the traffic that twitter sees every day. That said, maybe you could get around it by breaking the chain into randomly distributed sub-segments or something like that. Maybe I'm overestimating the storage requirements and it wouldn't be so different than what bitcoin has to deal with already. And ah yes, the miners... Not as much motivation for miners to verify transactions (or posts or whatever) with a service like that, and kind of a pita for the users if they have to pay something for each tweet... then again, would probably cut down on twitter bots/spam...
It seems to me that a project like that would be really difficult as Twitter has had enough problems scaling an infrastructure they control 100%. But yeah, I think there's a lot that could be learned from bitcoin to do something like that.
About the size of the blockchain: yeah, it would probably explode. On the other hand, if the dreams of BitCoin proponents are to come true and BitCoin will become the new online currency it wants to be, it will explode anyway.
About the scaling problems.... the bitcoin ecosystem is altogether the biggest supercomputer ever. I think it will handle it somehow.
Of course, the problems like searching in the blockchain for a given address would still be there. But again, thin clients (and, therefore, a slight centralization) are the future for bitcoin anyway.
I was thinking the downside would be that the blockchain would end up being HUGE if it got even 5% of the traffic that twitter sees every day. That said, maybe you could get around it by breaking the chain into randomly distributed sub-segments or something like that. Maybe I'm overestimating the storage requirements and it wouldn't be so different than what bitcoin has to deal with already. And ah yes, the miners... Not as much motivation for miners to verify transactions (or posts or whatever) with a service like that, and kind of a pita for the users if they have to pay something for each tweet... then again, would probably cut down on twitter bots/spam...
It seems to me that a project like that would be really difficult as Twitter has had enough problems scaling an infrastructure they control 100%. But yeah, I think there's a lot that could be learned from bitcoin to do something like that.