When all you have is a hammer, the whole world is a nail.

Server-side, Reddit is a pig. It consumes an undue amount of resources for what it does - if a thousand people look at one Craigslist page, Craigslist has to create and serve one page a thousand times. If a thousand people look at one Reddit page, Reddit has to create a thousand pages and serve them each once. That's the curse of vote rank.

I am not a computer engineer. This may very well have been a clever way to leverage the problem. But as someone who debuted at #3 well-rounded when Karmawhores.com went live this:

Furthermore, when a user upvotes content, that sends a small amount of bitcoin to the author of that content, thus incentivizing the production of good content

...is pure bullshit. MrGrim figured out how to monetize content on Reddit a long-ass time ago. He created Imgur. "Good content" is easily-digestible images and this way lies funnyjunk, cheezburger, 9gag and all the other advertising-heavy content recyclers.

More importantly, though, the "server costs" of Reddit are pretty meager. I did some back-of-the-envelope calcs and based on this, where Yishan says that $3.99 pays for 476 minutes of server time, Reddit's servers cost about $5k per year. They've got 58 employees at about $50-$75k per year (including benefits and such) and two executives and they're pulling down about $8m a year in ad revenue.

Reddit's expenses are 3 orders of magnitude higher than anything a "decentralized Reddit" could have saved them.