Not saying you should buy new, but compare prices with Starlabs and Slimbook etc too when you’re at it. System76 and certainly frame.work are more on the expensive side. Slimbook has had a good spare parts catalog for my model, no idea about others. Maybe wait for a Canada-EU trade deal XD
I don’t study the market but I’m not counting on price drops in the coming 2 years. Real cost will likely go down only with inflation.
The internet is great for connecting machines. HTTP(s) could even be used to transfer messages. Blockchain is good for maintaining a historical record. The farther down the chain you go, the harder it becomes to rewrite history. You pay for this feature by requiring everyone to permanently keep the whole shared historical record. Some workarounds for the permanent storage of the whole history exist but that’s blockchain in a basic form. The permanent record is a nice feature for things like financial transactions.
Blockchain bros tried to convince us blockchain is great for sharing information in an effort to increase its relevance. You may connect it for that reason. In their defence, blockchain can be used for data transfer, it’s just not that great at it.
Blockchain could be used to assert trust, but most problems have equally good or better alternative solutions for that. Very often these use digital signatures and public-private keypairs.
You may want to look at YaCy for a decentralised search engine.