IS BLOCKCHAIN THE ANSWER TO CENSORSHIP?

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Data Science

• Session 1

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Is Blockchain the answer to censorship?

• 2018 has been the year that authoritarian
  governments have gained more power around the
  world. From Russias Putin to Turkeys Erdogan
  and Brazils Bolsonaro, authoritarian leaders
  have come to power in almost every corner of the
  world. Comedian John Oliver in his new segment
  from Last Week Tonight listed the common traits
  of all authoritarians.

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• Oliver claimed that authoritarians tend to
  project power and demonize their enemies going so
  far as to eliminate any real opposition to their
  power. In such times, a distributed ledger that
  is entirely free from the control of such
  governments is one of the few ways that ordinary
  citizens can voice their concerns without the
  fear of reprisals and even use these ledgers as a
  store of wealth that can withstand any government
  authority. We take a look at the properties of
  blockchains which make them useful for curbing
  censorship and how they are empowering dissidents
  across the globe.

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What Makes Blockchains Resistant to Tampering?

• The aphorism if youre not paying for the
  service, youre not the customer youre the
  product being sold captures the internet economy
  well. The current economic model of the internet
  works largely by selling advertisements to
  unsuspecting users. As a result, large internet
  corporations such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon
  track their users extensively for clues about
  their behavioral patterns.

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• They use the information gleaned from their users
  to market ads more aggressively to them. Facebook
  and YouTube are particularly notorious for
  censoring pages and posts based only computerized
  monitoring resulting in a loss of livelihood for
  several content creators on a regular basis. The
  situation is especially bad for activists and
  dissenters living in countries like Saudi Arabia
  and China which are prone to physically harming
  people who challenge the status quo.

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• Steemit is a blockchain based social network that
  is completely opposed to centralized censorship
  and relies on user feedback to promote posts,
  similar to Reddit. For instance, when Chinese
  activists began publishing their stories using
  the MeToo hashtag, the government responded by
  deleting the posts. To circumvent the censorship,
  users began recording their ordeals on the
  Ethereum platform.

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• They did so by sending themselves a small change
  of Ether and attaching a memo to the transaction,
  making the memo forever saved on the Ethereum
  blockchain.
• Blockchains have been created with the clear
  purpose of facilitating transactions safely in a
  trustless environment.

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• People choosing to transact with Bitcoins do not
  need to rely on any intermediaries to process the
  transaction as there is a dedicated group of
  users called miners who take care of that. The
  miners consist of a large number of individuals
  mining using their private computers along with
  dedicated mining farms which resemble modern day
  corporations.

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• Combined, they generate over 50 Exahashes (1018)
  per second. That means that an attacker would
  need to accumulate upwards of 25 x 1018 hashes
  per second to overwrite any transaction. Such an
  excessive amount of computational power is just
  not economically viable for a single entity to
  acquire. Also, due to their decentralized design,
  blockchains have no single point of attack or
  failure. That means even if a few nodes become
  faulty or malfunction, the information remains
  safe in millions of other devices on the network.

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Access to open Marketplaces

• The so-called dark net markets or dark web
  markets have earned themselves a bad reputation
  as havens for drug dealers and hitmen. However,
  several reports have indicated that the vast
  majority of transactions involved legal
  transactions for commodities such as marijuana
  which was legalized in countries like Canada and
  several states of the USA. Such marketplaces
  allow users to transact directly with each other
  using cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and
  Monero.

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• Proponents of these markets have argued that they
  are crucial to the spirit of freedom in countries
  that they operate as governments should not
  interfere with which substances users choose to
  experiment. The next generation of these markets,
  known as Open Bazaar is also being developed
  using distributed ledger technology so that they
  are more resistant to being shut down.
• .

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