Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Public Blockchains As A Means To Resist Information Censorship, Gregory Rocco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The purpose of this research is to demonstrate how public blockchains offer a greater degree of censorship resistance over traditional web-based information broadcasting mechanisms, and a comparison of existing options. Public blockchains present a means to mitigate censorship from nation states through both a broadcasting and data storage mechanism. They are costly to attack and difficult to remove from the public due to their distributed and accessible nature. A recent incident in China proved the worth of public blockchains by forcing the distribution of a censored letter describing harassment by Peking University into an Ethereum transaction by an anonymous individual …