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From China To WikiLeaks: Censored Texts Survive In Bitcoin And Ethereum


Bitcoin is described by individuals in varied way, some say it is digital money currency, a digital store of value and a platform for data that is immune to censorship.

Fundamentally, anyone can access and upload data, thanks to technology; nevertheless, bitcoin has transformed that data into directly valuable economic assets by establishing a bearer asset that can be traded for goods or fiat money. Interestingly, transferring texts is banned in one nation, they are completely legal in another. 

Project Spartacus, an effort to employ ordinals to inscribe every war record on Wikileaks, was inspired by this new use case. An interview with Dr. Ai Fen, the first "whistleblower" physician in China during the COVID-19 pandemic, was also banned. It was first posted on the Ethereum blockchain and many of the resources pertaining to her were progressively removed from the Chinese Internet.

A new technique called ordinals makes it possible to associate each sat in a Bitcoin transaction with an equivalent resource in the Bitcoin's memory pool. As a result, it is now possible to generate NFTs on Bitcoin.

Project Spartacus uses ordinals to facilitate the conversion of Wikileaks war log photos into Bitcoin. In this case, the objects in question are a permanent archive of papers related to which Julian Assange was prosecuted. By choosing to commit one of the war logs to every block, they can make sure that the financial power underlying Bitcoin is dedicated to safeguarding the logs. Additionally, there is a section for Bitcoin donations to different nonprofit organizations.

Not only has non-economic data been put into Bitcoin blocks before, but with ordinals, there has never been a greater need or opportunity for programmatic inscription implementation. The secret is to utilize a script and imprint several images or actions such that, to the user, they appear to be a single transaction.

The ideology behind Bitcoin’s creation has led to this new censorship-resistant way of disseminating information. Monero, one of the first Bitcoin forks, gets its name from the Esperanto word for money. Socialist nations like Vietnam and the People's Republic of China co-opted Esperanto, the misguided attempt by anarchists with a global mindset to communicate, in order to strengthen their hold on power.

With its value rooted in far more modern technology and financial incentives for its survival, bitcoin has a far better chance of surviving and spreading.