Thanks Vijay. :)
Do you think people still read technical books?
I personally don't read technical books. I mostly go through docs and learn new things while doing. But that is certainly not true for everyone out there. However, this seems to be an excellent question for the whole Hashnode community. So, I went ahead and started a poll here. Let's see what everyone has to say. :)
And why do you want to open-source? Is it to reduce cost or more community participation?
At Hashnode, we strongly advocate openness and transparency. While you can be transparent to a great extent while being closed-source, OS takes it to a whole new level. It's certainly not to cut the cost. Our server bills are still going to be the same, even after open sourcing. As you said, the primary goal is to involve the whole community in every aspect of Hashnode and boost the adoption in the process.
Why Blockchain? Don't you think it is an inefficient way of doing things? Lot of processing power goes waste.
I think Blockchain is an excellent way to provide ownership to your users and become fully transparent. If Hashnode moves to a blockchain based platform, all the code + data becomes public. One can argue that data is public anyway. However, they are not the same thing. A company may provide API based access to their data, but if you don't agree with their philosophy and vision, there is nothing much you can do about it. But if the platform is on blockchain (thereby Open Source), the users of the platform always have an option to create a fork of the platform since both code and data belong to the whole community, not the particular company. However, I don't think the current environment and ecosystem is mature enough to build and sustain a blockchain based community - but I am optimistic and I am closely observing what's going on. :)
Regarding processing power going waste - I think that's a problem faced primarily by PoW based platforms. There are other consensus mechanisms such POS, dPOS, hashgraph etc that don't require heavy computations like PoW. However, there are trade-offs that you should be aware of. IMO, there are too many things going on in blockchain ecosystem and developers are still figuring out efficient ways to do the same thing.
What if someone finds a solution to solve the hashes faster?
It's just a matter of time. :)