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Piggybacking Off Full Nodes To Secure Freedom Of Speech

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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.