Steem Mentioned On Counter-Currents

As some of you know, I've been dropping Steemit links on Gab and posting Gab's homepage on Steemit. The two are complementary, in that Gab works a lot like Twitter and Steemit works like Medium. They complement each other in another important way: they appeal to outsiders and folks who are sick of worrying whether or not they'll be suspended, shadow-banned or booted off simply for speaking their minds about a controversial subject. Or, for hurting the feels of someone with a lot of clout.

Gab has set up an environment where everyone can "Share Freely." Steemit offers a sharing medium (sorry) which is powered by a blockchain. The blockchain backing makes it very difficult to censor because blockchains are run as incentivized peer-to-peer networks. Someone who aimed to censor a blockchain network not only has to muster a lot of computer power but also has to deliberately shoot him-or herself in the foot while doing so. As the history of Bitcoin has demonstrated: by the time a blockchain has become big enough to get the power-that-be concerned, it's become too big to censor. Not only because any would-be censor would require a huge amount of computing power to do so, but also because Bitcoin mining is very profitable for the pros.

This had had the happy side effect of helping out some Venezuelans! Our own @hilarski is one of the movers and shakers behind Vemine, an initiative to help impoverished tech-savvy Venezuelans by bringing mining equipment to them, with the goal of getting Bitcoin working as an alternate currency to help straighten out Venezuela's deranged economy. Read up on it here, if you haven't already seen it in Reason.

(Image from an independent source but it fits perfectly!)

Because it's so profitable, Bitcoin mining supports a specialized chip called an ASIC that does nothing but calculate hashes. The pros in the industry watch the ASIC suppliers very closely. They know well who can produce these chips and who can't. If some mysterious party like the NSA tried to hoover up enough ASICs to perform a 51% attack on Bitcoin's blockchain - even if they only tried - they would set off a lot of alarm bells in the Bitcoin world. The core developers would find out very quickly, long before that mysterious actor had enough time to set up their blackhat rigs.

With Steemit's Delegated Proof-of-Stake system, the delegates have to be voted into a top "witness" role. They have to get the active consent of a large part of the community, many of which are jaded cryptocurrency vets. Long-earned reputation counts for a lot; a beguiling stranger would set off a lot of alarm bells too.

So, censorship of Steemit content - except for "self-censorship" via editing - is virtually impossible. Suffice it to say that it's a heckuva lot more difficult than getting ahold of Jack Dorsey.

Enter The Pizzagate

Yep: as the image (from here) shows, Pizzagate is a "Worldwide Citizen Investigation." A worldwide citizen investigation into the shady, creepy parts of powerful figures' private conduct. We've been down this dark road before: that's for sure.

(Image from here.)

Platform like Steemit and Gab come into their own when ordinary citizens investigate the powerful. As you probably are well aware, r/pizzagate has been vapourized by Reddit.

(Images from here and here.)

Naturally, that ban did not stop Pizzagate one bit. The kicked-out Redditors went to Voat.

And to Steemit!

Voat And Steemit In The Same Breath...On Counter-Currents

Okay: I admit I sometimes have unusual reading habits, especially before I hit the proverbial hay. For those of you who haven't heard of it, Counter-Currents is a well-established publishing house and Webzine of the alt-Right. According to this post by its owner Greg Johnson, it had almost 150,000 unique viewers last month.

The article posted just before it - second on the home page as I write - was about #Pizzagate . It's by Aedon Cassiel and it starts off by pointing out that the huge girl-grooming crime ring in Rotherham was first exposed by disreputable alt-right bloggers - month before it officially became a scandal:

Beginning in 1997, in an English town of more than 100,000 people, eight Pakistani men stood at the core of a group involving as many as three hundred suspects who abused, gang-raped, pimped and trafficked, by the most conservative estimate, well over a thousand of the town’s young girls for years...

The Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal first “broke” in the far-right blogosphere. The accusation they made was that these gangs were being allowed to operate undisturbed because everyone was too afraid of “appearing racist” to properly investigate them . . . and nobody listened to the far-right bloggers who were breaking this story because they were afraid of “appearing racist” if they gave any credibility to those far-right sources, too. Never mind that it seemed paranoid to rely on bloggers to report truths like these when the allegations were so wide-reaching, involving a literal conspiracy within the police force.

And yet, years after no one was willing to take them seriously, the far-right blogosphere turned out to be right.

Well over a thousand (mostly) white young girls were being abused by (mostly) Pakistani gangs.

And the authorities were covering it up.

Unsurprisingly, Cassiel says that the Pizzagate scandal is similar. He also point out that the investigation is continuing on censorship-resistant like Voat and Steemit:

The evidence is of wildly varying levels of quality, ranging from the pareidolia of “Jesus is appearing to me in my toast” to “wait, that’s actually pretty damn creepy.” The mountain of claims and observations and speculations being compiled in places like Voat and Steemit are too overwhelming for any one person to hope to wade through sorting wheat from chaff, and while I don’t intend to try, I will summarize some just a little bit of it here.

You see? The venerable Voat and the up-and-coming Steemit are mentioned in the same breath.

(Image from here of course!)

The Importance Of Steemit

The fact that Counter-Currents recognized it shows that the word is spreading about Steemit and its censorship-resistant design. Steemit Pizzagate investigators can post their results here without fear of their work being deleted into oblivion. Just as they can share their thoughts on Gab without worrying about being thrown off because someone powerful yelled at the top boss.

#Pizzagate is a perfect demonstration of what censorship-resistant blockchain technology is for. We're doing our part - all of us Steemians - to hold up an ecosystem and community that makes sure untoward opinions and hard truths can't be squelched!

(Image from here and of course here :))

So, Steem On! The Bigger Steemit Gets, The Bigger The Censorship-Resistant Signal!

...and, if Pizzagaters find a smoking gun, The Children...

(Last image from here.)