Piggybacking Off Full Nodes To Secure Freedom Of Speech
Bitcoin is boring, but so are all foundations. No one looks at a house anymore and says to themselves:
Wow! This place has running water! What a marvel!
Running water is a miracle of sanitation and cleanliness, but it's been around for so long we just expect that every house would have it. The features that Bitcoin provide are the same way. It isn't very interesting after you start diving balls-deep into crypto, but we often forget it is absolutely necessary after the novelty wears off.
Bitcoin is more censorship resistant than any other cryptocurrency. This is due to high hashrate and a huge network, in addition to having a lot of nodes and keeping the consensus layer simple and the blocks small.
Where as most of us here at Steem would see Bitcoin's inability to change as a huge detriment, it is actually a feature that compliments the entire cryptosphere.
What happens if I try to release my peer-to-peer gambling game (Pentaskill) and the government pressures Steemit-Inc to not allow that code to run? On a bigger network like Bitcoin or Ethereum, no problem. I'll just run the code on a different node and the other nodes will be forced to at least recognize that the code is there on the blockchain.
With Steem (a much smaller network) censorship might be much more of a problem. The smaller the network, the easier it is to attack and control. Big stake holders are more easily coerced to corrupt our democracy and vote in witnesses that will "play by the rules".
Am I worried about this actually happening? Not really. This community seems to become quite resilient when faced with hardships. However, if Bitcoin didn't exist, it would be very worried because Bitcoin takes the vast majority of attention away from the other projects and shields them with it's own censorship resistance. Everyone helps everyone. This is the nature of synergizing network affect and abundance capitalism.
Conclusion
The cryptoshere is like P2P torrenting on steroids. We all saw how that worked out. Torrenting was impossible to crack down on even when services like PirateBay were being hosted on a single node. With a worldwide network of nodes all in consensus centralized control and regulation becomes impossible.
The next big violation that will signal the final decline of old economic system will be a major attack on freedom of speech. They will absolutely have to attack freedom of speech directly, because the consensus nodes that actually bring those services into the world are becoming unassailable.
In the past if you wanted to ban online poker what did you do? Make it illegal for the banks to process the transactions. This is how centralized control works. You can't stop an individual person from spending their money anyway they see fit (at least it's much harder). Now that freedom of speech is being secured programmatically, governments will find themselves fighting a losing battle to silence their citizens one by one in an ever-increasing world of discontent.
Luckily for us, our founding fathers had the common sense to write it in to the first amendment, knowing full well that this day of reckoning would come and that the masses would need to awake from their delusions of freedom.
Bitcoin is the safe haven in times of trouble, even for the rest of the crypto market... Governments and the people in power are fighting a losing battle, they are just a few while we are many!! This whole thing started with the decentralization of information (the internet), as soon as it became adopted their losing battle started... more information means more education, more education means more ways to fight the system...
Um...are you having sex with crypto?
I got REALLY annoyed with it when BTC was so high and it wasn't even usable. But I'm not into it enough to care much more than that. It's use case is much smaller than Steem. It just has to be usable to send value to someone, and hold value. At that moment, it was only really usable for holding value, and the extreme inability to transfer it made it very difficult to sell, right when it was spiking. That lowers the actual value considerably. Of course they patched it after that and it's a lot better now. And many people were able to sell and buy in lower.
Steem has a much bigger use case. That makes the amount that has to be done a lot more. We are in a similar situation though. Our use is being limited and we're all just sitting around waiting for the patches.
Sadly we've already seen examples of that. Though I'm not sure if we've had state actors doing so. Maybe.
Of course, some would probably argue against us having some manipulation of votes...and they would be wrong. LOL.
We've had certain people push changes and witnesses just fall in line. We've had a ton of people file complaints, including DMCA, though that could be considered normal. We've had huge whales change their witness votes due to specific issues, changing the top witnesses. That last one is more of a feature, but due to the current size of Steem, there is quite a bit of control in the hands of a few. We've also seen the use and abuse of flags. That's a feature as well, but it's all in how it's used. There are tons of examples that others could likely come up with.
It's not like this is some conspiracy or anything though. People just use the tools they are given to the effectiveness that they think that they can.
It's important that we not ignore these things that could be argued as only small issues. Right now we're small. We're getting hints at things that will be much larger issues in the future. We can fix them, or we can do a Facebook face plant.
Sadly we're actually seeing that happen right now. I still can't believe that no one realize how huge of a deal it was that a major provider of a web service decided to drop 4chan due to it choosing not to censor it's users. If you talk to many law enforcement people, they often don't even think that these sites should be shut down. Sure, they're being used by white supremacists...but to demand everyone censor or be shut down...that's an insane precedent. Other providers might decide that if they got away with shutting down 4chan, maybe they can quietly do it to others. They already have occasionally, and it rarely makes news. But when it's just a hosting provider, it's not a big deal. When it's your local ISP, it's a bit bigger of a deal. But eventually it could get that certain people could be denied access to what have become avenues of freedom of speech.
And it's not just the white supremacists...it anyone that's an outcast. Anyone that's unloved by the mainstream will be sent off to the dark recesses of the net, then those dark recesses will be shut down. We'll just sweep them under the rug and constantly push them out of the limelight because we don't like them being seen.
Of course, there's a chance we'll get them on Steem... I'm not sure we're large enough really to survive that yet.
We need witnesses who care about us.
Great comment!
The reason Phil Zimmerman created pretty good privacy (PGP) was because the US was considering making high grade (for the day) encryption technology illegal outside of the government. He distributed the source code on bulletin boards (long before github existed) to ensure everyone could have access to it. I’d hate to think where we’d be today if the government had carried out their plans then!
@edicted, If we decide the whole story by it's cover it's not fair. Truth can be experienced when we experience something.
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