Is Steemit Really Censorship Proof?
Let's imagine that there's a Russian dissident here, who'd like to share sensitive government information with the world. What stops the Russian government or its oligarchs, to buy into Steemit with a 100 accounts, each worth 100,000 USD, for a total of ten million?
Can you imagine a hundred whales, downvoting any author, regardless of their reputation? How about downvoting everyone on Steemit and holding the network hostage?
Sure, after a 10 million dollar investment, Steem's value will skyrocket. But the entire network will be disrupted, let alone this single person, trying to release important documentation.
What do you think? Can Steemit handle a millionaire adversary and protect free speech?
Or would you rather invite famous whistleblowers here, so they'd drive the price of Steem up, by incenting governments to buy Steem, in order to engage in censorship?
Image property of its respective author.
Доброго времени суток! Подскажите где можно ознакомиться с переводом данного произведения? Вы к сожалению забыли его опубликовать....
I've published this short article in English only - you can use Google Translate to get the gist of it.
Вам не следовало указывать тег ru в этом случае. Или нужно было использовать Google Translate чтобы писать в эту ветку на русском.
I've tagged the post "ru" as I'm talking about Russian oligarchs. I'll have this in mind for the future, sure.
Interesting idea
Steemit is not censorship proof but STEEM is. Steemit is just an application that is built on top of STEEM. Even if you censor something by flagging it, you can still see it in the blockchain. https://steemd.com is another way to look at the posts in here.
I'm discussing the resilience of Steemit, not Steem, right?
So you are saying that it's not a problem that authors here will have their reputation destroyed, and all their articles will be flagged as spam and hard to read. Now imagine a whole network of posts, which are flagged. Reputation becomes meaningless (it pretty much is, at the moment, btw) and all posts and their comments are collapsed and greyed out.
And if Ned and Dan have to intervene, isn't that censorship of the censorship? In other words, wouldn't the idea of a free and censorship proof media have failed at this point?
The creators of Steemit would get sued if someone were to use the platform to publish information that powers that be don't want published. They wouldn't bother making accounts and playing the (capture the) flag game when they can instead play on their own court.
Depends where Steemit is hosted. In many countries, the owners of the site are not responsible for the content. Do you think anyone sues Facebook for hosting millions of copyrighted images and videos? Or Wikileaks, for hosting sensitive government information?
It would be nice if the answer was no but it's a yes. We live in a world where even little kids can't run a lemonade stand. Facebook has huge departments of people to deal with just that and we all know the crap the Wikileaks owner deals with. The owners are still responsible. Social media like FB and Twitter always delete content and accounts when the pressure is on.
So what's your point - that they do get sued, but said social networks continue working despite that, because of their huge profits? If we assume this is the case, then wouldn't Steemit be even more vulnerable to censorship from people threating to sue? In effect, Steemit will be prone to more censorship than Facebook or Twitter, because it doesn't have a department of lawyers, as there aren't enough funds to pay for their services?
My point is if someone does want to go after Steemit, they will either go through the courts and wreck the creators financially or go straight for the creators and treat it like a criminal enterprise. They can label it like another Wikileaks except with cryptocurrency, which they don't understand and think only criminals partake in. Its naive to think it would end well. All I'm saying is one person using Steemit as an exclusive platform for 'leaked' information that major powers want down isn't worth it.
OTOH, by making this large investment the government will help Steem price grow. And they will not be able to remove any information from the blockchain anyway. And their censorship attempts will be transparent: they will not be able to covertly hide or downgrade posts like it is possible with proprietary centralized platforms. Someone could even setup a "dissident" clone of steemit.com that will prioritize and highlight the posts downvoted by pro-government whales. Also with enough money they may be able to take over the top witnesses, doing so will likely provoke a hard fork.
It's interesting how people refer to the blockchain as something indestructible, when it's just a database on several computers with known IP's. A physical attack against the owners and their property would work, especially when there are few witnesses like we have here.
Yes, everything on the blockchain is transparent, and the accounts downvoting content will sooner or later be identified (but not the individuals behind them or who paid for the attack). Now that you have a list of downvoters, what do you do?
If you downvote the downvoters, you achieve nothing, as reputation is meaningless - other people's posts are already collapsed and grayed out, and now so will be attackers'. What stops them to continue disrupting the network?
Ned and Dan will have to block their user accounts. Oh-oh... Steemit refuses access to the personal accounts of a hundred people, worth $100,000 each. What will happen next?
Вcё злo в мирe проис хoдит от США. Да и американские ологархи намного богаче всех других. Американские олиграхи смогут перекупить и устроить свою цензуру. Вообще в США практикуются много внесудебных казней и убийств. Так что америкашкам даже особо покупать ничего не нужно.
You can't say that all evil comes from the USA - other big countries, like Russia, China, Germany, etc., have their own influential billionaires. Censorship and elimination of free speakers is typical for both Russia and the US - although the latter don't usually kill anyone psychically, but destroy their authority through privately owned media and through economic pressure.