What Germany Just Did Will Make You Afraid, Very Afraid

valued-customer (67) in steemit • 8 years ago (edited)

View this post on Hive: What Germany Just Did Will Make You Afraid, Very Afraid

8 years ago by valued-customer (67)

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personz (66) · 8 years ago (edited)

Edit: I should have started with this - I'm very disappointed this became law, I can hardly believe it actually, I was sure it would get shot down in Parliament

Since Steemit can't be censored, and posts can't be deleted, this means that Steemit cannot comply with this law.

As far as I can tell, that makes Steemit a criminal conspiracy in Germany, and all Steemers criminals liable to jail time.

Not so. Steemit.com can refuse to serve certain posts, as for example they explicitly agree to follow intellectual property laws of the US in the Terms of Service:

Steemit respects the intellectual property of others by not reading infringed content from the Steem blockchain. If you believe that your work has been copied in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, you may notify Steemit’ s Designated Agent by contacting:

[email protected]

Please see 17 U.S.C. §512(c)(3) for the requirements of a proper notification. You should note that if you knowingly misrepresent in your notification that the material or activity is infringing, you may be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by Steemit or the alleged infringer, as the result of Steemit’s relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing.

I imagine this would extend to situations like this. It would be a cost on the company though and they may just decide to not serve any German IPs, who knows.

However the Steem blockchain cannot be stopped. It's not clear how the law would or would not limit what is essentially peer-to-peer messaging, and if they are not blockchain "aware" they will have worded it for "sites", i.e. world wide websites serving via HTTP. If that's the case they may not be able to suppress Steem, under this law at least.

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3 votes

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valued-customer (67) · 8 years ago

I am again schooled by @personz! I am sure I learn something valuable from you every time you make a post I am able to discover.

I was unaware of the ability of Steemit to selectively serve content from the blockchain, and will consider this more fully. While I immediately see the reason for Steemit to have this ability, I also am immediately struck that this is something that can be used to censor, and have to think about it before I can make informed comment.

At least posts do become part of the blockchain, where they can be discovered, rather than simply be deleted. That's something.

Thanks for always adding to my understanding!

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2 votes

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cupidzero (58) · 8 years ago

I watched this develop with great concern, specifically thinking of how it would impact Steemit. The censorship issue is also one I have thought about extensively. While posts can't be taken off the blockchain, their visibility can be drastically affected by downvotes/flags. What is to stop a billionaire like Soros buying a few million fiat worth of Steem and paying a few dozen cyberwarriors to prowl and downvote things out of visibility? Nothing as far as I can tell, am I missing something?

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1 vote

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valued-customer (67) · 8 years ago

Soros et al. can do far worse than censor Steemit. Consider that a sybil attack on a blockchain simply requires that a majority of nodes producing blocks collude. In Steemit SP acts to produce a mathematically identical mechanism potentiating control of SP: the more SP you have the more influence you have on the distribution of SP.

Presently over 90% of rewards inure to a handful of accounts (I have been unable to get post HF19 data to precisely characterize this concentration to compare with this prefork data that shows 99% of author rewards went to 1% of accounts) and this dominance is predicated only on wealth.

This is an Achilles heel that will not persist for much longer. I recently replied to a commenter that stated he was self voting because Steem had crashed and reduced the value of his holdings by $50k, to ~$150k. I pointed out that BTC had recently been $3k, and were Steem to be but 1% of that price, he would achieve capital gains of $4,350,000. Mining the rewards pool hardly compares to that return, and it is only a matter of time before control of SP is attained by hostile capital (if the code continues to permit it).

Oddly, the most profitable course is to make rewards fairer, as this best potentiates capital gains, which is far more potential of significant returns than mining curation. However, voting on witnesses can change this by changing the code, and smarter people than I will take advantage of this possibility, when they get around to it.

To my dismay, this may already be in process, as HF20 is intended to exponentially increase adoption of Steemit, and the only thing in the way of an enormous pump and dump is the 13 weeks necessary to power down.

Since this is trivial to change, Steemit's vulnerability is existential.

$30 Steem isn't that far away, and the financial manipulations that suppress Steemit's growth by concentrating the rewards, that are intended to support content creation, in the accounts of substantial investors in Steem, is probably the main reason that Steem isn't bucking the general crash of cryptos. Steem is unique amongst the cryptos in it's use case, which potentiates unimaginable capital gains (far greater than I have treated here).

Since all it takes to control the rewards pool distributions is money, Steemit, and Steem, are very vulnerable to hostile takeover. The code could easily prevent this, and I hope that the codebase does soon preclude such attacks, rather than potentiate them.

As you point out, it is similarly trivial to make posts all but invisible with sufficient SP backing your VP, and I am not incognizant of the likelihood that this kind of information will be found inconvenient in the near future. Only changing the code to preclude the very control of rewards (and post visibility) by the wealthy can protect that wealth from even greater wealth.

This seems to be beyond Steemit's PTB presently, as far as I have ascertained in my discussion of the topic.

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cupidzero (58) · 8 years ago

Great insight here, learned a lot from it thanks!

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bitcoinrider (38) · 8 years ago

hi there, that is a very good point - that is actually the edge. what happens to bitcoin? if they cannot beat it, they join it - or at least have no choise to let it happen? I don´t know, but watching very attentive on these developments. That´s the front line. Cheers bro

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1 vote

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valued-customer (67) · 8 years ago (edited)

I reckon the more we watch these developments, the better able we will be to defend against censorship. We need to do exactly that. Thanks for doing it.

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deirdyweirdy (61) · 8 years ago

Scary stuff indeed. It is now up to private companies to decide what is and isn't criminal.

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1 vote

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valued-customer (67) · 8 years ago

It is clearly not fakebook that will decisively act to counter censorship, as they demonstrably censor when a market would be unavailable to them if they didn't censor.

It's up to people, like you and me, and those that intentionally create private companies specifically purposed to resist censorship, like Steemit developers, to keep freedom lawful.

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1 vote

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krnel (78) · 8 years ago

Centralized powers like to control the information. That's why my work on consciousness and morality that got "too high" visibility due to rewards making it go trending had flagging applied because it's "not the type of content that will help steemit attract, retain or grow a user base". Many whales view flagging as a way to prevent content they don't like from gaining more visibility and "censor" it that way, to limit the popularity and visibility in part. But that's individual abuses due to their concentration of power. It's not a "perfect" system that has the law/code to make things work right, but is indeed more censor resistant than the rest ;)

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1 vote

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valued-customer (67) · 8 years ago

While flagging is, imho, shown to be abusive, particularly as your experience demonstrates, and counterproductive to Steemit becoming more widely adopted by people, that, for example, agree with those posts you made that were so flagged, at least the posts themselves weren't simply deleted.

Your words were still communicated, although you clearly were demotivated from speaking. Such speech as you did undertake remains available on the blockchain, and, afaik, will remain so regardless of any intent to censor you.

You are clearly correct that Steemit is the least censorable medium presently available, afaik. It is fortunate that those that would censor you aren't able to assume the power inherent in systems amenable to centralization.

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1 vote

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louisbettong (59) · 8 years ago

Not just flagging, but the incentive for votes may cause people to self sensor or produce popular content. Which is not so bad except if there were no whales with alternative views

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1 vote

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teamhumble (74) · 8 years ago

fear -- you gotta find me first ;) i'll be on #moonbase-alpha ;)

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valued-customer (67) · 8 years ago

Voting with feet is exactly the response I suggest is appropriate to censorship. I only hope Steemit is able to provide a censorship free medium for Germans, and citizens of the ~dozen of so other western nations that have criminalized free speech.

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gwiss (48) · 8 years ago

Decentralized blockchain is one tool that society will use to just go around the ossifying social structure. Nature doesn't tolerate inflexibility.

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valued-customer (67) · 8 years ago

Let's hope that we can simply prevent censorship through technical development, and never again need to shed blood to defend our right to speak freely.

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gwiss (48) · 8 years ago

Amen

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corvo (56) · 8 years ago

Scary stuff man, great post though. New follower.

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valued-customer (67) · 8 years ago

Thanks!

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gigafart (57) · 8 years ago

We're getting a rush of front-ends to format and selectively serve content from the Steemit blockchain. (There's an economic incentive to dev these apps -- they take a cut of user upvotes.)

It's all very good, so long as we retain full access to the blockchain.

I'm sure we'll soon see a Steemit.com clone that offers a fully uncensored (un-greyed-out) experience.

When onboarding improves (expense, anonymity), I'm guessing we'll see 4chan occupy a neighborhood here, too.

I see a future where we all have a place on this blockchain, accessing with our preferred app, and level of filtering.

Now let's prepare ourselves for the mainstream media backlash!

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valued-customer (67) · 8 years ago

LOL Ermagerd 4chins!

So, does this information you provide (new to me) mean that Germany compatible Steemit is potential?

I'm ambivalent about that. Prolly good for Steemit atm, but I reckon a fully blossomed Steemit that was uncensorable at all would eventually be good for Germany.

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1 vote

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gigafart (57) · 8 years ago

I could see them getting their own special version of Steemit in their App Store. Germany has had similar censorship with video games. What’s China gonna do? I think we know...

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1 vote

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valued-customer (67) · 8 years ago (edited)

What I fear is that there may be no haven for free speech left in a world in the glare of the panopticon, subjected to the eternal boot to the face that is American law in the wake of the Patriot act, and eternally blinded to the truth of our sovereignty by opaque propaganda.

In my lifetime I have seen America go from a bastion of liberty to the most venal despoiler of it.

I haz a sad about it, but more importantly, wonder where might now be, the land of the free.

Recently Gov. Jesse Ventura mentioned in an interview that he was going to supply content on RT.com, because other outlets were too leery of his freethinking ways.

I'm not sure Russia is going to preserve freedom of speech in a world that has lost the taste for it.

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3 votes

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karencarrens (58) · 8 years ago

I found you @valued-customer because of an insightful comment you made on a random post. Thanks for doing what you do here! Following. 🤗

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valued-customer (67) · 8 years ago

Thanks!

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theapple (32) · 8 years ago

great respect to germany!

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valued-customer (67) · 8 years ago

I'm confused by your comment. Your vote indicates agreement with my post, which isn't supportive of Germany's censorship, but the words you use in your comment indicates support for German censorship. 0_o

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