Using IP tracking is not an option I would advise, for several reasons:
- Most home IP addresses change regularly, so there's a chance that people will be barred for no reason.
- As you pointed to, the use of IP firewalls is problematic in other ways.
- This approach prevents members of the same household from creating their own accounts, for no real reason.
I think we ideally need to develop the account 'incubation' idea a bit further and also to make the solution generic so that all Hive dapps can make use of it easily.
I guess some of this measures is to avoid bot accounts but there has to be an easier way, besides when someone new sees that there is an option to pay for an account to a "blockchain" project, meh might look fishy at first, just details that need to be work out