If you’re not familiar with blockchains, you can think of them as a system for making information ubiquitous and permanent by spreading it out across many, many computers that all work together to keep it safe and available. This stands in stark contrast to the current standard method for storing information on the Internet, in which privately owned servers maintain a master copy of information and send it to other computers upon request. Trying to censor a traditional server is comparatively easy because the information comes from a single point. Trying to censor a blockchain is like trying to kill a thousand (or million) headed hydra — it’s not actually impossible but it’s generally prohibitively difficult. Even if an attacker removes or compromises many of the computers that are participating in the blockchain, the rest will keep the information intact and available.

The human race is still figuring out what exactly to do with blockchains. So far, most of the hype around them has centered on financial applications (i.e. Bitcoin or private blockchains run by banks). There’s a market incentive for the financial industry to incorporate Blockchains, because it spends heaps of money trying to secure digital transactions using existing technologies that are inherently less secure. But beyond finance, political and activist uses of blockchains already exist and deserve more attention. Like cryptography in the 80s or the non-military Internet in the 90s, the blockchain is a new technology with unexplored potential to radically level inequalities in access to information and freedom of speech.

This photo is embedded in the Mazacoin blockchain at http://bitfossil.com/5f1a91e9c6b97e6c3dc64385b3c5615c74fe3f0554269a143ee262122c4e206e/CrtrnP7UMAApy5M.jpg. Image Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-Alike © Unicorn Riot.

Payu says that this is the first time he knows of someone embedding protest photos in a blockchain. After spending some time on Google, I can’t find any others. I don’t think this will be true for long; it’s easy to see how Payu’s technique would be even more impactful in a country without checks against government censorship.

I hope that activists facing censorship-happy governments are quick to get their hands on blockchain-undergirded publishing platforms and communication apps. At this point, there isn’t a simple way for non-techies to add photos to a blockchain, though services like CryptoGraffiti that allow you to do it if you know how to buy Bitcoin. Someone has already used the Bitcoin blockchain to save leaked files exposed by WikiLeaks.

If you’re looking to add a protest photo indelibly, but don’t have the skills to embed it in a Blockchain, you can use ipfs.pics. The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is not a blockchain, but it is similar in that it is a distributed file system that spreads data through countless computers around the world, so that it is very hard to remove.