We need a censorship-resistant truth protocol – I have the idea, not the skills
6 comments
Just dump it on the blockchain. That'll get it replicated all over the place, and it'll be impossible to remove.
But that's not your problem. You don't just want the information out there. You want everybody to pay attention to it. And that's a much harder problem. They don't actually need to eliminate the information. They just need to bury it under a billion other pieces of information.
Those don't even need to be lies. The best lies are just shaded, cherry-picked versions of the truth. Lies are lazy propaganda -- though admittedly, people seem perfectly content to accept that too, even when a tiny bit of effort would contradict it. Your "truth store" doesn't do any good if people aren't going to use it.
But that's not your problem. You don't just want the information out there. You want everybody to pay attention to it. And that's a much harder problem. They don't actually need to eliminate the information. They just need to bury it under a billion other pieces of information.
Those don't even need to be lies. The best lies are just shaded, cherry-picked versions of the truth. Lies are lazy propaganda -- though admittedly, people seem perfectly content to accept that too, even when a tiny bit of effort would contradict it. Your "truth store" doesn't do any good if people aren't going to use it.
What you are writing about are several different things; first of all, you're writing about open information - because truth is always a simplification of information. Information on the other hand, is man-made statements which some people believe are true, some believe is wrong, and some believe are deliberate lies, with or without malicious intent.
And any piece of information can be all at once, depending on from which side you look at them.
But, that detail aside; Yes. We need information to be free. We need to emphasize information that - as a whole - gives growth and prosperity to humankind as a whole. We need to suppress information that - as a whole - delay or reverse human development.
But I don't mean "hide" or "stop" such information.
Let's say dictator X have stolen 10% of her country's wealth for personal gain. But during her reign she managed to lift the standard of living, increase health of the common and the poorest tenfold. Both pieces of information are "true", but depending on the conclusion drawn from each of them in isolation, that information can be used for both good or bad.
That's the philosophical part.
Then comes the ethical part; Who gets to decide what information is good for mankind to emphasize, and what is good for mankind to suppress?
Not every single individual on earth have the empathical or intellectual ability to deal with all kind of information with an open mind in a way that is - for mankind as a whole - positive.
And once again; what is good vs bad for humanity also depends on how long time you're going to consider; What is good for humanity for the next 100 years might be bad if we continue on the same path for 1000 years. But that might be a hypothetical judgment because we don't know what changes it might bring in 1500 years. Let alone 15000 years.
Then there's the technological part. That's the easy one.
The technology to verify the origin of information, and to verify how it has been altered, to ensure it is resilient against accidental and intentional removal exist and is well-established. Block chains, torrents, onion etc are just tools. The most difficult part is to provide the means to give access; If a state decides to simply deny access to internet, you will be back to the 80's way of sharing information, and no matter how perfect the protocol is, it doesn't matter if there's no infrastructure on which it can run.
And any piece of information can be all at once, depending on from which side you look at them.
But, that detail aside; Yes. We need information to be free. We need to emphasize information that - as a whole - gives growth and prosperity to humankind as a whole. We need to suppress information that - as a whole - delay or reverse human development.
But I don't mean "hide" or "stop" such information.
Let's say dictator X have stolen 10% of her country's wealth for personal gain. But during her reign she managed to lift the standard of living, increase health of the common and the poorest tenfold. Both pieces of information are "true", but depending on the conclusion drawn from each of them in isolation, that information can be used for both good or bad.
That's the philosophical part.
Then comes the ethical part; Who gets to decide what information is good for mankind to emphasize, and what is good for mankind to suppress?
Not every single individual on earth have the empathical or intellectual ability to deal with all kind of information with an open mind in a way that is - for mankind as a whole - positive.
And once again; what is good vs bad for humanity also depends on how long time you're going to consider; What is good for humanity for the next 100 years might be bad if we continue on the same path for 1000 years. But that might be a hypothetical judgment because we don't know what changes it might bring in 1500 years. Let alone 15000 years.
Then there's the technological part. That's the easy one.
The technology to verify the origin of information, and to verify how it has been altered, to ensure it is resilient against accidental and intentional removal exist and is well-established. Block chains, torrents, onion etc are just tools. The most difficult part is to provide the means to give access; If a state decides to simply deny access to internet, you will be back to the 80's way of sharing information, and no matter how perfect the protocol is, it doesn't matter if there's no infrastructure on which it can run.
> YouTube can kill a video for having the wrong medical take.
YouTube can kill a video for looking at it funny. It's a private platform and they're not beholden to hosting your content if they don't want to.
This is the problem and you're not going to solve it with crypto. People don't want to deal with ownership of their content, they want to live in a fantasy land where "throw it over the fence" information distribution exists. Someone has to host it for other people to access it, and if your contents are sufficiently insane then people won't want anything to do with you. Case in point: IPFS, lbry, rumble, etc.
YouTube can kill a video for looking at it funny. It's a private platform and they're not beholden to hosting your content if they don't want to.
This is the problem and you're not going to solve it with crypto. People don't want to deal with ownership of their content, they want to live in a fantasy land where "throw it over the fence" information distribution exists. Someone has to host it for other people to access it, and if your contents are sufficiently insane then people won't want anything to do with you. Case in point: IPFS, lbry, rumble, etc.
"Truth" isn't some objective data blob you can measure. Feels like you're talking about entropy and epistemology in some sense. Feels like you have no idea what you're talking about; you don't like what you see and want to change it. In another way, you're trying to grasp the concepts of incentives, social networks, and proof of signal...but again, you didn't define anything, so the idea is just noise. Keep reading and stay hungry.
Let’s make it uncensorable now, before it’s too late.
The tech has existed since the start of the internet but people just don't want to bother with it. If the majority of people self hosted their own content then had something similar to the old "web rings" of sorts then it would become exponentially harder to play whack-a-mole in taking down, censoring, redacting, cancelling, etc... I know all the arguments. Wont scale!! well that is a lie. I ran a porn site in 2000 that scaled to tens of thousands of concurrent users on a single Pentium 3 700 Mhz server. But it needs to handle millions!! also a lie when everyone is running their own nodes. In reality a single video might have a few thousand simultaneous viewers and that can be handled easily by 1999 tech and trivially today on modern tech. People have been programmed to believe the only possible options are the large centralized platforms and it's just lies. No crypto needed, just a simple server, a web daemon and a platform managed by the open source community with its repository not hosted on a platform owned by a corporation. Ignore everyone. Happy to myth-bust all the other lies. Pick your favorite forum software and try it out. If people complain about friction just accept those are the people you probably don't want anyway. Their contributions will be extremely low effort. Find some quality members and do not expect it to explode in growth over night.
Hacker News is running on a single server. It sails along just fine with the occasional code bug that team dang have always managed to sort out. Most of the time it is not on a CDN. It can even handle some topics that some governments would really like not discussed. To make it harder to cancel would just mean multiple people at YC creating multiple registrar accounts, a few domains each and the low risk members each knowing about some of the fall-back domains and of course a few .onion domains each.
If the site is not hosting borderline content then one could even just run HAProxy and Wireguard on a little VM and host the actual server at home. This works fine even with CG-NAT as the home is reaching out to the VM over WireGuard. Cachable content can remain at the edge with the right cache-control headers and HAProxy configuration.
To put another way, if 8chan can still exist then pretty much anything within the gray areas of law can. not linking to there from here
The tech has existed since the start of the internet but people just don't want to bother with it. If the majority of people self hosted their own content then had something similar to the old "web rings" of sorts then it would become exponentially harder to play whack-a-mole in taking down, censoring, redacting, cancelling, etc... I know all the arguments. Wont scale!! well that is a lie. I ran a porn site in 2000 that scaled to tens of thousands of concurrent users on a single Pentium 3 700 Mhz server. But it needs to handle millions!! also a lie when everyone is running their own nodes. In reality a single video might have a few thousand simultaneous viewers and that can be handled easily by 1999 tech and trivially today on modern tech. People have been programmed to believe the only possible options are the large centralized platforms and it's just lies. No crypto needed, just a simple server, a web daemon and a platform managed by the open source community with its repository not hosted on a platform owned by a corporation. Ignore everyone. Happy to myth-bust all the other lies. Pick your favorite forum software and try it out. If people complain about friction just accept those are the people you probably don't want anyway. Their contributions will be extremely low effort. Find some quality members and do not expect it to explode in growth over night.
Hacker News is running on a single server. It sails along just fine with the occasional code bug that team dang have always managed to sort out. Most of the time it is not on a CDN. It can even handle some topics that some governments would really like not discussed. To make it harder to cancel would just mean multiple people at YC creating multiple registrar accounts, a few domains each and the low risk members each knowing about some of the fall-back domains and of course a few .onion domains each.
If the site is not hosting borderline content then one could even just run HAProxy and Wireguard on a little VM and host the actual server at home. This works fine even with CG-NAT as the home is reaching out to the VM over WireGuard. Cachable content can remain at the edge with the right cache-control headers and HAProxy configuration.
To put another way, if 8chan can still exist then pretty much anything within the gray areas of law can. not linking to there from here
It’s no longer a conspiracy theory to say that governments — authoritarian or “democratic” — are now openly working to limit the distribution of certain kinds of information. They don’t even try to hide it. They regulate platforms, force takedowns, threaten fines, and use "disinformation" as a legal crowbar. What they really fear isn’t chaos, or even lies. What they fear is unfiltered truth.
Truth that hasn’t been interpreted, branded, fact-checked by “partners,” or algorithmically buried. Truth that’s raw, uncomfortable, unpredictable, and — most of all — uncontainable.
And that’s exactly what I think we need to protect. I believe we need a protocol — not a company, not a platform, not a brand — that makes truth functionally impossible to censor. Not because it’s illegal to censor it, but because it’s technically and socially unviable to do so.
We’ve seen what happens when power feels threatened: platforms are co-opted, founders are pressured, policies change. Even Twitter, which promised to be the “free speech” platform, is already bending. Facebook is state-aligned. YouTube can kill a video for having the wrong medical take. Substack and Rumble may hold out for now, but they’re still choke points. Still targetable. Still fragile.
What we need is something like a living, breathing immune system for truth. A protocol that distributes sensitive or critical information the same way a torrent network distributes files — redundantly, irreversibly, and autonomously. Something that allows people to report corruption, abuse of power, hypocrisy, waste — and have that evidence uploaded, validated, analyzed, and published in a way that no single entity can erase.
Ideally, this would include mechanisms for anonymous whistleblowing. AI-based pattern detection to connect dots across cases. Public scoring for politicians, judges, institutions, agencies. Tracking of promises made vs. delivered. Reputation based on action, not marketing. Public money traceability. Radical transparency by default. And everything backed by decentralized storage and consensus.
I know, some of this may already exist in parts. But it’s not unified. It’s not bulletproof. It’s not trusted. And most importantly, it’s not designed from the ground up with one goal in mind: to make truth unstoppable.
This idea — I call it VERITAS — isn’t about ideology. It’s not left or right. It doesn’t care about parties. It only cares about facts, evidence, and accountability. And it should be fundamentally incompatible with being owned, monetized, co-opted, or shut down.
I know this sounds ambitious. But I believe it’s necessary. The State, as it exists today, doesn’t survive through legitimacy — it survives through narrative control. And if we take that away — not with violence, not with chaos, but with cold, hard, data-driven transparency — we can fundamentally alter how power operates.
So this is my invitation. I’m not asking for donations. I’m not launching anything. I just want to see if there are people out there who feel the same urgency. Who understand the technical side of this, and who might want to sketch out what a system like this would look like.
Fork this idea. Steal it. Build on it. Improve it. Make it better than I imagined. Or reach out — I’d be glad to work together. I just want it to exist. Because we’re running out of time, and the walls are closing in. And once truth becomes fully permissioned — we’ve lost everything.
Let’s make it uncensorable now, before it’s too late.