image source:Hacker Noon
on occasion censorship looks like the practice is as antique as writing itself and that, for as long as we've writers, we’ll usually have someone this is willing to censor or silence them for his or her very own non-public gain.
From Socrates’ untimely dying to internet sandboxing, censorship has taken many paperwork at some stage in records and the fact is that it deprives us of expertise and continues us from prospering as a society.
It is going far past what you don’t get to read inside the newspaper or watch on television. information and amusement have a great effect on our society, shaping evaluations and influencing the way we revel in the arena on many tiers.
over the years, the net has acted as a safe haven for people who are seeking to locate facts and people that are seeking for to show it. but, its centralized, yet worldwide, structure has made it the perfect car for surveillance and censorship, allowing information to be edited or even removed at will.
Blockchain generation may be visible because the tool the internet turned into supposed to become. Decentralized Blockchain networks supply authority to none, regardless of their wealth or social repute. alternatively, authority is shipped proportionally at some stage in contributors, growing a balance of critiques and views. From change of value to exchange of records the primary programs for the Blockchain have been centered on the exchange of fee and not on the change of information/understanding.
however, the evolution was bound to appear and now, complex cryptocurrency systems like Ethereum and others allow customers and developers to discover an countless number of opportunities with none to tell them what they are able to or can’t do. despite the fact that these networks permit for whole freedom, there may be nonetheless much to be executed. The information that may be saved on these networks represents however a tiny fraction of the content material we can locate on-line and, even though they may be gaining traction, maximum cryptocurrency networks are some distance from being production ready.
Steemit, as an instance, has been capable of create and hold a network wherein writers are completely loose to put in writing approximately what they want with no form of centralized censorship applied. no longer only is Steemit a platform where writers are loose to explicit themselves, however it is also a place in which they may be rewarded for his or her work, depending entirely on how well their content is acquired by way of the network. It’s really worth noting, however, that Steemit’s reward model has also made it truly unreliable, given that whales (users with large holdings) could have a big impact on the author's’ rewards. this could be executed by using downvoting content material they don’t like or through the usage of upvotes to sway writers into enhancing their content. Cointelegraph asked Ricardo Gonçalves, a outstanding witness in the Steemit community and the founding father of SteemSports and BuildTeam initiatives, how he felt about this issue.
image source: Medium
Bringing the internet toward its authentic ethos
converting the way we have interaction with the internet will not show up overnight and it'll maximum likely be a long and exhausting technique. however, there are promising answers on the horizon, a lot of which might be leveraging Blockchain technology to convey the internet closer to its original ethos.
even as the internet itself has a good deal room for improvement, small adjustments also can power evolution forth and bring our liked net lower back to its unique vision (with out breaking it alongside the way).
Archain, as an example, permits pages on the net to be stored on a Blockchain-like network which could scale to an arbitrary length.
the answer proposed by using the Archain crew permits a decentralized archive for the internet to be created, giving users get admission to to deleted pages and allowing them to pass-back to uncensored variations of the content they are dealing with. We asked Sam Williams, CEO of Archain, how a decentralized archive for the internet can help cease censorship.
Blockchain and copyright troubles
however, we also have copyright troubles, a polarizing problem. even as some shield that all records have to be freely available, others insist that authors ought to be rewarded for his or her work. at the same time as both are legitimate points, Blockchain technology may additionally assist attain a compromise wherein each views are applied.
Kim Dotcom, the internet entrepreneur behind the Megaupload report sharing platform, has come up with an answer which can make both aspects of the copyright debate happy. This solution is known as k.im, a decentralized platform wherein uploaders (a.k.a pirates) might be able to set a price for the documents. even as visitors will pay to down load the content, broadcasters, studios and different copyright holders can purchase possession of the pirated documents and take advantage of its sales. This permits the documents to be available, even as also protecting the losses of the copyright holders to an extent.
whilst all the aforementioned projects aren't a exact technique to censorship problem, they're imparting residents with the tools their need to defend themselves from it even as constructing the premise for what can in the future end up a truly free and open net.