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A good portion of cryptocurrency supporters are against purging important information and many of them hope that blockchain technology will help boost censorship resistance. A new project in the works called Bookchain aims to record essential books on the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) chain so the written words cannot be silenced, banned, or purged.
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Books Can Remain Free from Cleansings and Purges
The creator of Bookchain, a developer who calls himself âKosinus,â sees the need for censorship-resistant books that are available on a global level for the whole world to read. There are plenty of books written throughout history that have been banned by a government within the borders of a certain country. Certain âunfavorableâ books that have been prone to âdisappearâ from libraries and censored over the years. This includes titles such as âThe Satanic Verses,â âMein Kampf,â âMemoirs of Hecate County,â and the âFederal Mafia.â Some people believe that in the future governments and authority figures could âcleanseâ the worldâs libraries of valuable books like the dystopian future described in the novels 1984, and Fahrenheit 451. The creator of Bookchain says the project is a âwork in progressâ and believes BCH is the perfect platform for storing important and politically unacceptable books.
âItems on the blockchain cannot be subject to censorship, banning or silencing for the duration of the internet,â Bookchainâs creator details on the platformâs website. Â Â Â Â
The books or written material hosted on Bookchain are tied to BCH addresses which cannot be re-used, explains Kosinus. The text can be edited, but there is a safety measure in place for this functionality because when edits are detected, the newest should take priority. âEdits must not be made 1,008 blocks after the book is marked as complete, and when a successful change is made all previous reviews/curations must be invalidated,â explains the Bookchain websiteâs protocol specification.
Bookchain Developer Encourages the Upload of Hundreds of Widely Banned and De-Platformed Books
At the moment, the books and written text on Bookchain include âThe Virtue Of Selfishnessâ by Ayn Rand, Wei Daiâs âB-Money,â Cryptome.orgâs âThe Gentlepersonâs Guide To Forum Spies,â and of course, Satoshi Nakamotoâs âBitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash Systemâ white paper. The developer explained on the Reddit forum r/btc that he just grabbed a âbunch of random non-copyright books to test the upload tool.â It will be released shortly, says the programmer in response to critics discussing the protocol.
âIf you want to upload text like Mein Kampf, or the hundreds of other widely banned and de-platformed books out there, feel free to do so,â the Bookchain creator emphasized.
The upload tool will come out soon, at which point people can upload whatever they want, whether that be illegal books, or important documents, or bedtime stories.
âScaling Wonât be a Problemâ
In the protocol documentation, the Bookchain website details that there will be âuser-specific actionsâ added soon like the ability to tether an address to the literature so people can donate to the uploader. On Reddit, Kosinus detailed that he needs to do âa lot of testing before full release in a few daysâ and asked a few Redditors if they had any example books in mind so he could preview them on the website. People interested in the Bookchainâs progress can follow the project on Twitter, on the BCH-powered social media site Memo.cash, and the platformâs developer has a Telegram channel for protocol discussion.
Of course, there are a few BCH proponents on the r/btc forum who are not too keen on storing large text and books that take up a lot of space on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. But the Bookchain programmer doesnât see scaling as an issue and thinks the BCH network will handle projects like this just fine.
âThe solution to this problem is to just keep scaling in line with what we can actually do â But as long as we donât scale beyond what is possible with whatever current tech is capable of it will never be a problem,â the Bookchain creator stressed on the forum.
Kosinus concluded by stating: Â Â Â
Even if we scale beyond that, there are slight centralization issues, but not more so than IPFS for example, so archival nodes will always exist and data on the blockchain will always be safe.
What do you think about banned books or any types of literature being uploaded to the BCH chain? Let us know what you think about this project in the comments section below.
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Images via Shutterstock, Bookchain, and Pixabay.Â
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