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by pingpongchef 1880 days ago
I'm most interested in the censorship or in more friendly terms, authenticity gains that blockchain can provide. In a world where works are being revised, "special edition"ed or straight removed from availability, I'm eager for blockchain technology to sidestep these dark patterns.
1 comments
acdha 1880 days ago
What precisely is the mechanism by which you think a blockchain would change that? Blockchains are easily censored — trivially so in the case of digital media since the blockchains are too inefficient to host it directly.

The more fundamental problem is adoption: you're talking about things which most people have convenient access to, so there's very limited demand for new distribution systems and that means that anything which doesn't give the rights-holder the ability to yank content will largely be ignored. The number of people who are going to tell their kids they're not watching a Disney movie until it's available on a blockchain is a tiny rounding error of the number of people you'd need to make those blockchains viable.

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pingpongchef 1880 days ago
> the blockchains are too inefficient to host it directly.

True, this needs to be addressed before I can get what I want. In the case of media it's got to be either on-chain or strongly coupled so that once published, an artifact remains available even if comparable artifacts are produced. It probably won't happen top-down, media giants are keen to keep their content in their walled gardens. Journalism might be a good fit to start with.

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acdha 1880 days ago
This seems like a substantially non-trivial problem to solve: hosting files is not free — think about how large a film is even with modern compression — and most copyright holders are concerned with preventing unauthorized copies.

A long-term durable copy requires ongoing money storage and transfer costs which have to come from somewhere but most people aren't going to pay to host something they can't use (due to encryption) or already watched / copied, and anyone trying to sell content is not going to use a service which allows unlimited unpaid distribution.

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