Also from the little i know about this current fad:
If you're attaching your tweets to a blockchain and 5 million users do that a couple times daily, how long till said blockchain becomes unmanageably large? Do they plan to truncate it so older tweets are lost?
The zooko system uses a "hack": since, this is blockchain, there is entire past history on the chain. So you can keep repeatedly updating a random field (like a TXT entry for some domain) and use equivalent of "git log" to read the entire timeline.
This will need a special client, which will parse blockchain for such updates, but everything on blockchain needs a special client, so not a big deal.
Re "5 million users" -- this is a very good point, and yes, if this takes off this will be significant problem for Handshake blockchain. I suspect this is the core of disagreement between Zooko's author and designers of the Handshake blockchain ([0]).
From the point of Handshake authors, Zooko system uses blockchain resources, but does not help with main mission (make Handshake team super rich by taking over existing DNS system).
From the point of "publiush", there is this Handshake blockchain which has authentication solved, and it can be used for all sorts of fun stuff. The fact that this was not original intent just makes it more fun and exciting.
Actually, I gave the idea to publius for this as he had mentioned. I'm myself excited by the no-censor DNS root system, but I'm passionate about the ownership of your own 'namespace' generically much more so than the DNS. That's why I made a pull request [1] to Bob Extension for example which later enabled publius (in his own words) to make applause [2].
I did also see what happened between publius and the admins of that discord, which is just another Handshake discord as there is no official Handshake discord, and I don't agree with what happened either to be fair. Political discussions can occur in much more mature ways on both ends of the spectrum.
[1] https://github.com/kyokan/bob-extension/pull/15
[2] https://github.com/publiusfederalist/applause (very cool)
The general idea is that you can do some pretty interesting things with DNS records beyond domain name lookup and verification.
Typically one sets up their handshake node with a DNS resolver to serve records, so in theory, if everyone used handshake node ups for DNS, this could be uncensorable
Which reminds me of a story. At Google in the mid-2000s, we used a corporate version of Google Chat, embedded in Gmail, much as it is today. One key difference in the UI was that your status appeared as text right below your name in other people's contact lists. Your status could be active, idle, away, or any freeform text that you set it to. The status lines in the contacts list updated in real time (ordinary today but remarkable back then). So people figured out that they could have an odd kind of one-to-many chat conversation by frequently updating their statuses. Not everyone was in everyone else's contacts list, so it was actually one-to-who-knows-how-many. And people used it accordingly, as if they were shouting stuff in a large room -- "does anyone know what's for lunch today?" "I heard it's lasagna" "beef or vegetarian?" etc.
Anyway, Evan Williams worked at Google back then, and I assume he saw these ephemeral messages flickering across his screen, same as I did. I wonder whether that planted the seed for Twitter.
I wanted to mention Carmack's .plan but I thought it's too old for blockchain...