Hong Kong people use blockchain to preserve evidence of anti-authoritarian struggle

The potential of the blockchain to maintain a distributed, tamper-proof infrastructure to store collective digital storage has had an unexpected political impact on the citizens of Hong Kong.

Disclosure on the Public Radio of Hong Kong (RTHK) intention In order to clear any archived content older than one year, residents save A large number of past news footage provided to the public free of charge so far. They acted hastily because people realized that the Radio Hong Kong archives contained critical reports on recent anti-authoritarian struggles and protests that were initially triggered by the introduction of a rigorous system. National Security Law, And evidence that these struggles have been brutally suppressed.

For a long time, the struggle for official collective records has been carried out at the official level, which was tried by the Hong Kong police rewrite One of the most narrative violence And the traumatic incident in the 2019 protests: the indiscriminate killing and injury of civilians in the suburban MTR Yuen Long. Due to the gradual deletion, the fair report of the incident by Radio Hong Kong will become one of the forgotten content.

In this context, the blockchain platform that first appeared at the height of the protest movement is now ready Provide citizens and activists with important means to restore and maintain the integrity of their recent political history.

The platform named LikeCoin is a blockchain-based decentralized publishing infrastructure that can provide a decentralized registry for all forms of content. Its function enables Hong Kong people to coordinate their work to archive records that are now on the verge of extinction across a distributed, tamper-proof collective database.

LikeCoin does not store the data itself, but instead registers metadata, that is, information about the content author, title, publication date and location. It also uses a unique and unchanging digital fingerprint to stamp each entry: International Standard Content NumberOr ISCN, similar to the ISBN of a book.

Kin Ko, the founder of the platform, told reporters that although downloading and saving content in a temporary manner may help citizens to a certain extent resist official censorship of history, proving the authenticity and integrity of the data will become more problematic in the future. He explained:

“If you are the person who backed it up, you can browse the hard drive. But what if you are not that person? Or the hard drive is broken? […] how do you know [backed up] Was the photo taken ten years ago? How do you know that no extra work has been done yet? “

With the help of LikeCoin’s blockchain infrastructure, within 10 years (perhaps many years) from now, it will be possible to know whether the content has been tampered with by tracking any changes in its digital fingerprint. When it comes to archived video clips of historical significance, it can provide a clue that the original file may have been re-edited in a deliberately misleading manner.

LikeCoin uses its own blockchain to avoid the high transaction costs of networks like Ethereum. Backing up a country’s recent political history is no easy task.In a more limited context, Ethereum has been memorably used to publish and save China #MeToo Activist Fight against government censorship.