RE: Advertising the blockchain away
I do think there would be a tradeoff between advertising and "censorship resistance." I also note that yes, any advertising would need to be on the presentation UI for the dapps. That's why I don't quite see how the money makes its way to Steemit Inc. to pay their development, api and full node costs. It seems the only beneficiaries would be the dapp showing the advertising and the users they split it with. But maybe that's enough if there is a shift to the dapps covering costs Steemit Inc used to cover.
I think having general platform advertising introduces fewer problems than having "super users" who get paid according to some algo like steem UA. I like steem ua, but there would be so much gaming of the system if we started seeing significant money be awarded by now. Right now steem ua is giving about a .10-.40 upvote once a day. Big difference of incentives when advertisers could easily give tens or even hundreds per post. I've done a few posts for Oracle-D, which is a kind of advertising, and they typically give a $5-40 upvote.
So I'm not so sure on the advertising route at all, though it may be the one the community decides to run with just to keep things running at all.
I still prefer your idea of the token lockup. Is discussion advancing about that?
I think it doesn't need to if the Apps create their own nodes and Stinc can reduce their costs heavily. They can then also develop the chain to make it lighter to reduce node costs and then have some stream come in from the Dapps themselves.
I mentioned Steem-ua because of algorithms only but large advertisers would create their own versions, almost guaranteed.
I think Steemit.com should be killed off and let the app interfaces take over and monetize themselves enough to cover a full node cost at least. One of the apps could still offer the same interface as steemit.com and take a beneficiary for it.
Not as far as I know but I keep mentioning it ;)