Ah, I see. So - building it into the core Steem code would be great, but would be much harder to do. Partly because of political reasons, partly because I don't write C++ and am not really interested in learning. If I had to wait for that, Pocket wouldn't exist for sure.

There's a middle option called Steem "plugins," where you can create a module that isn't part of the core code, but that the Steem witnesses can run optionally. It's how resteems, follows, and maybe reputation are implemented on Steem.

That would be a much better way to do it, but doing it exactly right wasn't my goal here at all. I intentionally made a lot of suboptimal decisions because I wanted to prove that you could build a token using comments alone. Taking the existing interfaces and making something entirely new with them seemed like a really cool challenge. I wanted to show people they could do something that maybe wasn't obviously possible, to expand their minds about what might be possible. We'll see if it works.

Using text of posts is absolutely a bad way to do what I'm doing, and unless this is wildly popular and changes the world, it will probably be the last time I do that. But it's also the only way to do it that doesn't require building a new interface.

I had a great discussion about some of this stuff with @picokernel over on the announcement post, might be interesting to you if you're interested in the technical side of it.