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 that is geographically distributed and that 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 paper demonstrates a unique application of blockchain technologies to create a platform that supports the freedom of expression. The paper adapts permissionless and public blockchains in order to leverage their advantages of providing an immutable and tamper-proof digital ledger. The study shows the blockchain potential for providing censorship-resistant publication platform. The paper presents and evaluates possible methods for building such 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 much lower cost than Bitcoin. to use as a platform to allow freedom of speech.