Here's the claim in the article: Unlike other systems, Dissent can guarantee that each user of an online forum gets exactly one bandwidth share, one vote, or one pseudonym, which other users can block in the event of misbehavior. That's a very useful property. We really need something that allows creation of pseudonyms without allowing one party to create lots of them cheaply and spam. Facebook, Yelp, and Wikipedia would be standing in line to buy a technology for that.

Unfortunately, Dissent can't do that. All the system really does is guarantee that in an established, stable group, each group member can vote anonymously, but not more than once. That's much less generally useful. It doesn't help with sockpuppets.

If you make people pay for a pseudonym/account, that helps, but then you don't need Dissent.