Blockchain Developer's Guide

Censorship resistance

Decentralized systems tend to be much harder to censor because of a lack of a central authority to do the censoring. For free-speech and free-information purists, this is not seen as a downside in the slightest. However, some information (child pornography, hate speech, bomb-making instructions) is seen as dangerous or immoral for public dissemination and therefore should be censored. As a technology, anything actually written into the blockchain is immutable once the block holding that information is finished. For instance, Steemit is a blockchain-based social blogging platform where each post is saved to the chain. Once each block is finalized, the data cannot be removed. Clients of the system could choose not to show ...