Interesting concept and I think it’s definitely worth the experiment!

If I understand the premise, what you’re trying to avoid is a hub effect (the rich getting richer) becuase traditionally users see messages already curated (e.g. with highest upvotes) and the idea is to replace that with an incentive for discovering new content.

Unless you have a way to define new content, wont you run into the same problem but now with $ tokens? E.g. one of the most upvoted news from HN is “Steve Jobs has died”. I imagine even on your system users would assume this would raise to the top and would buy a lot of “shares”, so it becomes more of a game of “predicting what will be further upvoted / echo chambered”. Am I missing something?

Again, exciting project nevertheless.