No, it's not OK, but the drive that some people have to make it an issue of skin color is misguided. It's not skin color, it's relevance. Equally cruel, but still different.
The world is organized by a small group of countries and power blocks that are in charge, whilst the other 90% has no meaningful economical or military relevance. This in no way makes it "more OK" to do harm, I'm just saying the selector is relevance, not race.
> The only reason one needs a block chain is if they are making a currency.
I agree with that. Besides, if some particular blockchain succeeds as a currency, it will inevitably host a social networking protocol where the whole network's state (e.g. who follows whom, who likes what posts etc.) is always available to anyone interested. That will let many various social networks flourish, and all of them will just present the same data differently. For prototypes check memberapp dot github dot io or memo dot cash, or peepeth dot com.
And that makes sense if you think for a minute. Social networking is the basic skill of every human, and small social networks (50-150 people) existed for hundreds of thousands years. Once we transitioned to agricultural based society, we had to develop financial technology to sustain growth and scale the society to billions of people. The basic technology needed to do finance is obviously writing, so for the past five and a half thousands years we existed in a society where we write to centralised medium, whether it is a clay table hosted by a temple or a visa datacenter. Blockchains change that, so that we can write to a shared medium to do financial transactions and eventually form more honest and opens social networks. Once social networks fuse with financial networks, that is kinda nuclear fusion. What we will have then -- let's call it civil network -- is extremely powerful technology of free expression and trade. Civil is, first of all, for civilisation, as writing is what makes civilisation possible, and new technology of writing (blockchain) is what allows civilisation to transition to a new level.
> Besides, if some particular blockchain succeeds as a currency, it will inevitably host a social networking protocol where the whole network's state (e.g. who follows whom, who likes what posts etc.) is always available to anyone interested.
I find that unlikely. The volume of social media far out classes that of financial networks. They also have competing concerns.
A blockchain is only secure because it uses up lots of resources to ensure that the network is secure hence it costs money to use the network. Social networks are useful because they are low friction: very easy to use, any time, freely, as much as you want.
Blockchains are like credit card networks in this respect, you (currently) pay 9 cents to have a transaction committed within an hour (or 35 cents for a few minutes), credit card companies offer a similar service in the 20-25 cent range. I don't see anyone paying 20 cents to have a post committed within a few minutes, or even 9 cents to like a post. That just doesn't track. (Let alone the storage space concerns...)
However, a federated social media service (think email) is a much more viable alternative. And it already exists. Such systems could easily publish public cryptographic ledgers, the joining of which would provide one with a state of the network at any given time. Again, no need to pull a block chain with proof of work into this, there is no reason we need to worry about that because trust can come from us knowing other people in the social network.
As a final aside, publishing the entire social network isn't even a feature most people want. Not really. Why do you think Facebook has privacy controls? No one really wants to post their entire social media profile on the web in some sort of provable immutable way.
