If you have a reference I'd appreciate it. I believe Paxos is the first solution invented way back in 1989 but published in 1998. And Raft is technically equivalent to Paxos. I'm sure he's proud that such a solution is now widespread in bitcoin, but bitcoin blockchain isn't the first and only solution.

But these are solutions to the problem of consensus among bad actors. Do we need consensus in social media applications? The only reasonable place we might want consensus is usernames, not that we need them, but that users seem to want to declare and own a globally unique one and you would need a consensus system to give users what they want. But I'm not sure the juice is worth the squeeze, and petnames avoid all the trouble.

If you are going to bother building a network of peers, a consensus algorithm, and an ever growing blockchain, you'd better be solving a problem that is worth all that trouble. Bitcoin clearly was. Usernames in a social media protocol don't seem to be worthy of such a heavyweight solution. I shouldn't have said "ugly", I should have said "heavyweight."