If someone's account gets lost or hacked, the person with the most incentive to own that account is usually the original owner, so just give it to whoever is willing to pay the most, problem solved. We can call it "proof of stake", where you always stake a certain amount to keep owning your account, and when contested, whoever stakes the most gets it.

Poor people don't deserve rights on the blockchain anyway, it's not like they can afford the transaction fees, if they didn't want their account stolen they should have tried being rich, or buying into nearer the top of the pyramid.

Don't worry about people who pass away or lose internet for an extended period, we'll deal with that in v2, when we get "proof of death" and "proof of internet disconnectivity" on the blockchain somehow.

/s if it's necessary

Perhaps some sort of namecoin or ENS-like petname system with multisig or some type of scripting that enables different recovery methods.

For example, you could set your petname up so it can be controlled by a single keypair, which can be overridden after a certain time by a ring signature based on keypairs held by friends, family, peers, and trusted computing devices you leave in a safe deposit box.

Or maybe you could trust your identity with some centralized entity, but only as part of a 2-of-3 multisig with yourself and another trusted entity.

Basicially namecoin with bitcoin-like scripting controls.

Good question, this made me think.

You get a reward for being a mining node, not just any node. Even then, do miners have much incentive to share blocks, other than the ones they mine?

I think the incentive is mutual for most nodes (aside from the mining aspect). People will set up a node to accept transactions in an automated manner, or to have higher confidence in the state of their accounts.

It's like being on the floor of the stock market. People participating want to be where all the information is (for their own benefit), and there is incentive to bring others in and share information (because it increases the amount of information you have).

I suppose you could be a "selfish" node. The bitcoin-equivalent of someone who leeches and never seeds. But the advantage is low relative to the amount of money moving around. Most people don't care about the bandwidth of running a bitcoin node, they care about latency. Unlike bittorrent, there isn't a de-facto finished version of the file being synced: it's a constantly-updating list that everyone wants to have the latest version of. I can't find the words, but this seems to be the fundamental difference.

What's the incentive for people to participate in file sharing networks? To some degree it's access to a world of free media (same as access to a world of decentralized identities), but to a large degree it's an interesting hobby/excuse to be interested in tech. Some people have racks of hard drives dedicated to hobbies like this, just because it's interesting and is worthy.

For me the incentive is being able to own an identity that nobody can take away from me. And the assumption is that services will support this type of identity, so I don't have to make accounts on other systems that people can take away and now I've lost all access to any data I had.