These are just the details I gleaned from the article. But, I have a similar understanding... that the blockchain functionality is similar to self-signing.

The article bills Vapor as helping to decentralize the "data layer" of an api. This naturally has some immediate caveats... like... this sort of framework would not be suitable for real time or streaming Apis.

Also, the article doesn't really touch on the cost of maintaining all of this. It's true that vapor api hosts can charge a small transaction fee to maintain/run their processing nodes. I have to wonder what that looks like, and if people are willing to pay a per-request fee for an http transaction.

I don't believe this is intended to replace standard authentication, and calling out how it's impractical for common scenarios is fair game. However, I think it's more interesting to think about scenarios where this might be useful.

> However, I think it's more interesting to think about scenarios where this might be useful.

Such as?

Well, the scenario would involve distributing information where one couldn't/shouldn't rely on a central authority. Imagine using this to coordinate protests against a government, or in countries where there's too much corruption to trust any centralization at all.

By my reading wrapping an HTTP request inside a bitcoin transaction does not solve for that use case.

Something like IPFS pubsub could work, or you could use any of the on-chain social networks that have sprung up, or you could use E2E group chats like everyone from the Taliban to activists in the US use.

E2E group chats are closely related, but ephemeral. IPFS seems also closely related, but it's dealing more with the content of a file, and not really designed for handling the identity of who wrote or distributed the content.