I read through your other series of 5 posts, very informative. This does sound like a significant weakness. To be honest, I have a friend who has been very sceptical about blockchain for social media. He is working on a distributed social network system (he's been working on it for years and has a patent). I loosely understand what he's doing but it is from the point of view of a closed source system. I think the architecture looks like the federated system of Mastadon but is way more efficient.
I'd love him to come and look at Hive more closely because I feel absolutely sure that his approach could live alongside Hive and help scale... I'll tag him, but I've got my work cut out to get him looking here. @davidboxenhorn
Unfortunately patents stifle creativity and innovation and claim to do the opposite. Intellectual property will be outdated in the future. No one is going to own IP; such is crypto. The value of open systems and collaboration is too strong. I wish him the best though regardless of the inevitable outcome. Hopefully he can sell the IP to a corporation for a small fortune.
I tend to agree but everyone has a different view on patents vs open source. I can see how much it will cost to turn his patent into a working system, and how there is absolutely nobody who'll work on that without payment up front.