We need to extend the censorship free aspect of the blockchain...
Part of the reason the blockchain cannot realistically be censored is due to its distributed nature. Yet, that does not protect everything we may wish to share.
I have experienced a wave of censorship hitting some of my posts, and this censorship does not originate on steemit.
If you embed images from a site, and that site goes down or chooses to remove those images then the censorship carries over onto steemit. Your post may be there, but the supporting images may be gone.
Some people have created image hosting services supporting steemit, but they simply used traditional web hosting. They were not distributed on the blockchain. This means that content is subject to censorship if that hosting service is compromised or taken down.
My recent posts were all youtube related, as an apparent attack on the Journalist Ben Swann is occurring due to him posting a rather unbiased video on Pizzagate for CBS 46. Now posts I made referencing his work for the last 7 months no longer have working videos.
We could again create a host and host our own videos, but that still would not be decentralized on the blockchain in any form other than the URL.
To truly be censorship free we need to come up with a way to store images, and videos in the blockchain. This is NOT an easy task as these types of data are far larger than the text it is storing now, and far beyond the size of a block. This is therefore, a daunting task.
In order for the data to be replicated any witnesses/nodes that are replicating the blockchain would see their storage requirements and bandwidth needs increase dramatically.
So it may not be realistic at the moment, but to be truly censorship free we need to be able to eliminate the possibility of censoring content of all forms on Steemit. Though that would also potentially make it a haven for copyright infringement. There are a lot of things to consider.
The recent ghosting of Ben Swann though really drove this point home to me.
Update
Some people suggested bitchute which I had checked out before. Yet I hadn't checked it out closely enough. It might actually be an example of a way we could eliminate this form of censorship. If you know torrents though it still requires that seeds exist. If there are no seeds for a piece of content then the content is gone. So it is not quite as extensive as if that data were permanently on the blockchain. It is a potential step in the right direction. Perhaps if it used seeds and if one doesn't exist had a fall back option to go to one of numerous hosts which could be changed/created etc to retrieve archived data... then the person that downloaded that might become a seed. It'd be a way of reseeding data.
I was reading the bitchute faq:
I cannot overstate the importance of WebTorrent. The Internet is full of centralized monsters and WebTorrent is the magical sword we will use to slay them.
I have not yet determine how we could EMBED such videos in our steemit posts.
Update 2
My friend @kaptainkrayola just mentioned storj.io for storing data decentralized in the cloud. Not the answer to all of these problems, but it is another piece of the puzzle.
Steem On!
I think native image upload is in the roadmap...
Im not sure how viable it is in markup or for steemit particularly, but its also possible to for a site to interpret a long hex string as a pixelmap so that it displays like an image.
Yeah I do know that can be quite data intensive. If I can figure out how to embed a bitchute video the fact that uses Web Torrent is potentially a step in the right direction as long as there are seeds.
https://steemit.com/news/@bitsburgh/block-chains-and-fake-news
I think it can be done but it will not be simple. Rarely the things truly worth doing are simple.
As to your post you mention Ethereum contracts which we should be able to do the same with Steem Blockchain and it seems the tech is actually faster on steem after some posts by @dantheman and potentially more easily extendable. Ethereum has the minds and ears of people as it came out first.
Yet I tend to be a STEEM Zealot now... :)
I'll admit, this is like day 3 for me on Steemit and it's pretty addictive. It's also kind of lame how you have to vie for attention, just for some ass puppet early adopter to steal your thunder with a click of a mouse or a flick of the wrist.
I truly think that just like bitcoin vs altcoins, it's not a wrestling match, it's a battle royal verse the ring itself. Nevertheless, right now bitcoin is Steve Austin in this scenario.
Speaking of scenario, do you SYNEREO ?
Honestly look at crypto and think future. Blockchain mining is irrelevant. The distributed ledger is the innovation and the real takeaway. Some would argue mining is a gimmick more or less. It's a "fair" way to launch a "fair" coin, until you look at ZEC launch and realize people are greed mining for unfair start and manipulate the hash rate depending on price. Same shit never changed.
Yeah I didn't say mining. I said witnesses. You still need copies of the blockchain replicated it at various points. This is what makes it something very difficult to take down.
So this means the data needs to be replicated.
Steem already doesn't really need mining. It does need its witnesses though.
Witness / Seed Node runner here.
All seed nodes keep a record of the current blockchain to distribute to new
steemdclients syncing to the network and catching up on the blockchain.As for witnesses my understanding is what the server is actually doing is validating the proposed blocks put together. My understanding is that STEEM is capable of running in "Pending" mode as well in the event of witness failure, I may (and often am) wrong though. In this case though normal functions of the chain would cease as you'd not be able to validate blocks.. But you would be able to still collect data.
Mining was literally added onto STEEM as another way for people to get them.. It's unnecessary and served only as an entry point to miner types not wishing to partake in blogging or interaction to earn STEEM.
Thanks for chiming in @klye. I have heard that but I am sure some people here have not so I appreciate your input as always.
Bit Chute is good...It's the best Y-Tube alternative I've seen.
Yeah, I didn't say it wasn't good. I said it is not distributed. This makes it vulnerable to future censorship. You simply need to control the central authority, and hosts that the data is on.
It is better than youtube, but it is still vulnerable.
That vulnerability is what I am indicating we need to address if we can.
Well it is using torrents... so perhaps it would do the trick... especially if the URLs do not require going through a centralized host. If you must go through a centralized host then it is vulnerable. If however, the video URLs worked kind of like magnetic links for torrents it could work well.
I agree as little as I know about these things.
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Check out BitChute... Perhaps this is an effective way to utilize distributed video content. https://www.bitchute.com/
I have, but there is no evidence that is decentralized. It is still controlled from a centralized location as far as I can tell.
Clarification... I still think bitchute is cool and a nice alternative to youtube. Yet I still have concern over the vulnerability of all centralized services/hosts.
Well it is using torrents... so perhaps it would do the trick... especially if the URLs do not require going through a centralized host. If you must go through a centralized host then it is vulnerable. If however, the video URLs worked kind of like magnetic links for torrents it could work well.
I updated my post thanks to digging into bitchute some more. Thanks for getting me to give it a fresher look. I did look at it a week or more ago.
Yeah, I looked into it a while back as well, and then didn't really follow up to investigate further, but it seems promising, and torrent-based. I will probably start using it when I have more video content to upload and see how it goes. You are not alone in your efforts to find solutions to these problems. :) I'm glad steemit is here to host discussions like these as we patch together our strategy for complete and utter resilience. :) Cheers!
I get what you mean about the data going bye-bye, but you're not using the word censorship correctly. It's not censorship.
What happened to Ben Swann fits with Censorship. Posts on Pizzagate... 48 hours later video is taken down, soon followed by pretty much all of his online presence, cancelling of an ISIS related project he had been working on that had been crowdsourced (he returned the funds). He made cryptic messages that seem to reference Sun Tzu and thus by implication the Art of War and "Trust Me" so something may still be in the works...
but he has effectively been censored. If it turns out he voluntarily and of his own free will did this, that is another thing.
Yet that does not change my contention. Material can be censored on steemit now simply due to our reliance on outside sources for some forms of media. It would be no easy task, but if we could eliminate that loophole then it would be resistant.
My bad, I wasn't specific enough. If an image hosting sits goes down, is what I meant. It's not censorship in that way when things go down. Yes, true for Ben Swan, and other youtubers who have had their videos taken down and their accounts as well, and that is because of censorship. Sorry for not being specific enough.
Correct if the site goes down due to going out of business, etc I agree with you that is not censorship at all.
Though distributing the data across the blockchain could potentially even help from those eventualities too... I hadn't even considered that upside as well.
Yeah, an encrypted one. But companies make lots of backups, and send them to like Iron Mountain. The blockchain would be huge for nothing.
True.
Multi-chain connectivity yeah, I would say to create chains or side chains for specific media-types: text, image, video, audio, whatever else.
You did create a new chain of thought for me though and potentially a big business opportunity if people wished to pursue it.
Disaster Recovery aka DR
Is a big buzzword and requirement for many businesses now.
The blockchain would be a very resilient method of implementing a lot of DR services.
Side chains would likely be the way to go... with other connectivity. For video requires more storage and bandwidth, but they likely would be not created near as fast as the text blocks.
So have the main block your text block, with links to needed side chains as appropriate. Then you could potentially adjust thru put requirements to match on a chain by chain basis.
You could even argue that the steem network has been freeloading. It has been using resources that do not belong to it. You could even go so far and say that to an extent it is even rent-seeking by not bearing the cost of the external content. Just starting a conversation. What do you think?
That argument could be made, but since youtube and other sites actually design their content to be embedded and shared at other sites I do not believe it qualifies. It is well within their revenue model.
Though some people might not agree.
I'm in agreement with you that content should be moved onto the blockchain. BUT, if you speed to work everyday and don't get a ticket except for today, is it now that the government is being oppressive?
Question, who is going to bear the price of bringing that content onto the blockchain?
I didn't provide the solution. I was illustrating the problem seeking a solution. It is the seed of thought and discussion.
Maybe we have here some potential size issue, haven't we? This may take a lot of disk space. Imagine with the future expansion of Steemit...
Yep, which is what I indicated in my post. The storage and bandwidth requirements would increase dramatically.
I think the people recommending bitchute might be onto something. It uses torrents which makes it distributed. Torrents work well as long as there are seeds.
If the torrent does not require going through something like a centralized host and is instead using something like a magnetic link it could work well.
interesting. So they are really considering that :)
Apparently they are more than considering it. Yet it is still in beta. There are some limited people they gave channels to that are actively putting content there. I don't know a ton about it. You could literally spend an hour and likely know as much or perhaps more than I do about it. :)
While I understand your desire for uncensored multimedia, there are some technical difficulties doing so. Let's assume that the witnesses increased the block size so that an image or even a video could be embedded in the blockchain. The servers that back youtube are many many terabytes of data. Orders of magnitude more storage than exist in a typical laptop or desktop. This is all contained and secured by hash in the blockchain. The blockchain would quickly grow to terabytes in size. In order to access this information would require a commercial server.
You would likely have to rely on a few services to host the data. The centralization of services is prone to censorship. What makes Steem censorship resistant is that it can be run by anyone on average hardware (<32 GB disk space, a decent single core processor, and 4-8 GB of RAM).
Until quantum computing and quantum storage is refined and affordable enough to be in our homes, storing that much data in a decentralized manner will be out of reach. The best solution is likely to have a centralized repository for multimedia and reference the media by hash. Using this technique it would be easy to determine if content is being censored. Worse than censorship is being lied to while being told a platform is open.
Yes, I already indicated that in the post. Data and bandwidth needs would increase dramatically.
I did not claim to have the solution. I introduced it as something to think about solutions, and I've updated my post with SOME ideas related to that. Some of them such as working with torrents as well like bitchute could actually work now with some work and wouldn't require special blockchain needs, but due to how torrents work if there are no seeds then the content would cease to exist so that is still a problem.
I didn't claim to have the solution anywhere. I pointed out a problem. I am very aware of bandwidth and storage solutions, it is what I deal with regularly among other things at my job. I am a Network Engineer.
I was trying to point out that the storage requirements impart centralization and thus the potential for censorship on the content that already exists on the blockchain if we were to be naive and simply increase the block size.