It's, per usual, some new hot bullshit straight from /u/ryancarnated's mouthhole. So, a quick primer on /u/ryancarnated:

• was hired by reddit as a "cryptocurreny engineer"

• ostensibly, only knows javascript, and he is constantly trying to shoehorn it into situations where it a) doesn't make sense or b) is insane to consider doing in javascript.

  • he has stated on several occasions that if he created bitcoin, he would have written it in javascript, a statement which is so comically naive that its hard to put into words.
  • for a non-developer, think of it like this: If I tell you to cut down a tree and present you with a fish and an axe, you'd want to use an axe, right? /u/ryancarnated is more a "well if I use the fish it'll eventually fall over" type of clown guy

• so anyway, he ended up doing nothing but working on his own hobby projects for a few months (provable by GitHub commit records), while on the dole from reddit (keep in mind, this is during 9-5 work hours)

• then he was fired (it was awesome), and very, very deservedly so

• in general, he is just what we in the software world consider to be a "lousy" developer, who is basically what happens when an "ideas" man does a few codecademy tutorials.

More recently

• got completely embarrassed by a member of /r/buttcoin after he claimed that a defect in BitGo's (his new employer) codebase couldn't actually be a defect

  • this was in regards to a user inexplicably sending a 80 bitcoin (~$16,000) fee with a small transaction. /u/ryancarnated, skilled and determined coder be he, stated outright that the issue couldn't be an integer overflow problem.
  • A /r/buttcoin user whose name I'm blanking on them went into absurd detail finding not only the bug but the actual commit it was inserted into their shitty codebase
  • long story short, /u/ryancarnated was completely wrong and it was hilarious to watch him get demolished by a /r/buttcoin regular

• and now, this stupid "decentralize reddit" thing

---

So with that out of the way, "decentralizing reddit" is a classic only something-an-ideas-man would come up with kind of idea. Some of the pitfalls (using http://www.redditblog.com/2014/12/reddit-in-2014.html as source for numbers):

• bitcoin is only capable of 233,280 transactions per day (maximum).

  • every post would need to be a transaction
  • every upvote/downvote would need to be a transaction

• to put that in context, that would imply (by reddit's own numbers for 2014)

  • 3.73 billion (3.73e9) link upvotes/downvotes
  • 2.01 billion (2.01e9) comment upvotes/downvotes
  • 535 million (535e6) comments
  • 54.9 million (54.9e6) links/submissions
  • TOTAL: ~6,329,900,000 transactions

This is ~17,342,191 transactions per day (at least, in 2014, in all reality its probably substantially higher these days). Bitcoin is only capable of handling 233,280 transactions per day. Even if the butters got their vaunted 20mb blocksize increase, that's still only 4,665,600 transactions per day, well short of anything practical.

But of course, if we ask /u/ryancarnated about this, I'm sure he'll have some fabulous ideas to pitch.

---

The other factor to consider is time and memory. Bitcoin is supposed to take ~10 minutes for a transaction to "confirm" once and thus start appearing in the blockchain. This means you have to wait approximately 1-10 minutes for your comment to show up. Of course, sometimes that figure jumps up to ~6 hours, because bitcoin.

It already happens with bitcoin that transactions are rejected because they, essentially, "time out", and never get included in a block. So you know that long post you just wrote? Just disappeared forever. Sorry for your loss.

Oh, and perhaps in the best part of all, if you want to use 'decentralized reddit' at all, you have to download the whole fucking blockchain which last time I checked was ballooning up to around, what is it now, ~60Gb? I hope you have some free space on your phone & a good data plan.

Oh yeah, and you need to pay-to-play to actually do anything on reddit (comment, upvote/downvote, submit, etc). Because users love paying for something they get for free.

---

So anyway, it's a comically terrible idea, one that only premier "ideas" man /u/ryancarnated could come up with.