Bitcoin’s Censorship-Resistance Was a Step Change in History – Coindesk
From www.coindesk.com
2021-07-22 07:00:00
Excerpt:
When he wasn’t getting enough attention from the public back in 2017, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon used to play this game: He’d just say something dismissive about bitcoin and it was sure to put him in the headlines.
So, a prominent entrepreneur at the time, Adam Ludwin, then CEO of early enterprise blockchain company Chain, decided to play along.
In a letter posted on his company’s blog, Ludwin argued to Dimon (and, presumably, his true audience, the many curious folks the open letter was sure to reach) that the quality that distinguished cryptocurrency and made it uniquely valuable was something called “censorship resistance.” Ludwin wrote:
“Nothing can stop me from sending bitcoin to anyone I please. Nothing can stop me from executing code on Ethereum. Nothing can stop me from storing files on Filecoin. As long as I have an internet connection and pay the network’s transaction fee, denominated in its crypto asset, I am free to do what I want.”Censorship resistance is a jargony way of saying speech, or any other activity, that can’t be vetoed or stopped. Ludwin might be right that it’s a killer feature of distributed ledgers, but it goes further. Censorship resistance is also a step change in the history of political philosophy.
It’s an idea that evolved from prior ones, going all the way back to the earliest days of Western civilization (at least). In particular, though, our modern conception of the right to state one’s opinion, or free expression.
