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Comment by aakilfernandes | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure why a blockchain is needed for this. Can't they just have an API where certain posts are "flagged" and hidden in the official UI? If you want to opt-out, you simply use a UI that doesn't hide flagged.

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Yeah, but then they could be ordered to take it down. I think the idea is to be censorship resistant in such a way that the company itself cannot make exceptions when pressured by a court, but I'm forgetting if that's me reading between the lines or if Dorsey explicitly talks about censorship resistance.

We've learned that you can't get around the law (eg. court orders) "because blockchain". The government has shown us that the law prevails.

But it actually is being shown to work.

When was the last time that a court successfully reversed a transaction on the Bitcoin Blockchain? The answer is never.

Sure, they have sent court orders to companies, or whatever, but the blockchain itself has never been reversed by court order.

Telling the government "I know you've told me to take it down, but we specifically designed it in such a way that we can't take it down" sounds like an incredibly good legal strategy that will definitely not backfire.

So far, the "we can't do that" defense has worked for companies that provide E2E encryption. The government may change the rules, of course; they keep talking about it.

I guarantee you that if you tell a judge you can't take something down "because you use blockchain" the judge will not care and just sanction your company.

To the degree that you provide a service the courts can order you not to provide it. If you've built something which makes it necessary to remove all content to remove any content, that's on you.

It is not enough because the true goal of moderation is not to hide content people don't like, but to lock out people the majority of people don't like so they can't communicate or work together to spread their (probably hateful) message.

Putting it on a blockchain is abdicating responsibility for any and all content, saying "hey, we just wrote the code, we don't store or propagate any of this ourselves."

Putting it on a blockchain doesn't magically remove responsibility. Twitter would still likely end up hosting that blockchain, since nobody else is going to foot that cost, and then they would still have fully responsibility over it.

If they just want to decentralize & use peer-to-peer instead they could also do that, and a blockchain still wouldn't be a useful aspect there. That's just a mailing list.

> Putting it on a blockchain doesn't magically remove responsibility.

I'm still kind of amazed that the government hasn't cracked down on bitcoin miners for hosting child pornography yet; every full node is hosting it. If the government ever wants to crack down on blockchains they have a valid legal excuse. The longer they go without cracking down, the more it seems like we as a society are accepting the existence of a censorship free medium of communication.

I'm not convinced that nobody else would host it. If they really made a blockchain anybody could post to it would seem difficult to stop other companies from making frontends for it.

> I'm not convinced that nobody else would host it. If they really made a blockchain anybody could post to it would seem difficult to stop other companies from making frontends for it.

How are those companies going to make money from hosting tweets? Are you letting blockchain hosts inject things? If so that's a security & privacy nightmare just waiting to happen. If not, it's financially insane to host it unless twitter pays people to do so. And if they do that then hey they're simply contractors for twitter, and twitter is again bearing the full burden of responsibility.

The same question can be asked of Twitter. Twitter serves up other content alongside tweets, and makes a profit doing it (as of last year). Is this a privacy nightmare? Yup. Is it more of a privacy nightmare if a different company does it? Depends on the company. Maybe a given user will trust a given provider more than they trust Twitter, or maybe they'll like their ad policy more, or maybe they'll be willing to pay a premium to not be served ads, or maybe they'll want to search through tweets using more specific filters than Twitter allows. To me, choice of provider sounds like something that should increase security for those who desire it and educate themselves. For those who don't, there are other tradeoffs they can make.

This all assumes I'm interpretting Dorsey's statements correctly, and of course I may not be.

> Twitter would still likely end up hosting that blockchain, since nobody else is going to foot that cost

Why do you assume that? Modern blockchains are not proof-of-work, and the only info you need on a blockchain are permissions and encryption keys to data on other distributed storage networks (e.g, IPFS.)

So the cost isn't really very high, and probably worth the tradeoff for groups that feel alienated or disenfranchised.

Modern blockchains don't host images and face twitter's level of traffic, either.

Bandwidth & storage isn't free. Why would anyone voluntarily just do that for Twitter? Even if it's literally entirely free to setup & host, that's still someone's time & motivation to do so. People do this for blockchain because they're trying to get rich off of it. There's no money in hosting tweets.

> Putting it on a blockchain is abdicating responsibility

Yes, that is the point. Making censorship more difficult is one of the main goals of blockchain technology.

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