Free Chain: Enabling Freedom of Expression through Public Blockchains

Abstract

Everyone should have the right to expression and opinion without interference. Nevertheless, Internet censorship is often misused to block freedom of speech. The distributed ledger technology provides a globally shared database geographically dispersed and cannot be controlled by a central authority. Blockchain is an emerging technology that enabled distributed ledgers and has recently been employed for building various types of applications. This thesis demonstrates a unique application of blockchain technologies to create a platform supporting freedom of expression. The thesis adopts permissionless and public blockchains to leverage their advantages of providing an on-chain immutable and tamper-proof publication medium. The study shows the blockchain potential for delivering a censorship-resistant publication platform. The thesis presents and evaluates possible methods for building such a system using the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchain networks. Our results demonstrate that the Ethereum blockchain is much more beneficial for our system as it requires a much lower cost than Bitcoin to use as a platform to allow freedom of speech.