Re:Ask HN: Starting an Anonymous Blog in 2019?
by wtmt on Friday November 08, 2019 @12:35PM
(#21484587)
This sounds like a good idea — dissociating the actual content from a platform like GitHub. But I wouldn’t suggest the bitcoin blockchain. Unless the OP has a decent amount of disk storage (which is easy to get) and a good amount of network bandwidth to keep it in sync and also push changes to the network, this would be cumbersome. The OP would also have to consider the time delay for propagating the update into the blockchain network (which could be several minutes or sometimes hours, AFAIK).
Maybe using the script to fetch from IPFS? (I have absolutely no clue if this is even feasible and how it would work)
Re:Ask HN: Starting an Anonymous Blog in 2019?
by lawn on Friday November 08, 2019 @12:49PM
(#21484789)
You don't have to run a full node yourself to embed data into the blockchain. Just use a light wallet (but be sure to obscure your IP) and push the transaction.
Re:Ask HN: Starting an Anonymous Blog in 2019?
by JoshTriplett on Friday November 08, 2019 @01:02PM
(#21484926)
This seems like a fast way to get de-anonymized. Not that hard to track backward from those posts to a localbitcoin purchase, even through attempts at obfuscating the source.
For the threat model described in the post here, if an adversary can narrow you to one of hundreds or thousands of possible sources, you've lost.
Spitball idea: Host your data in the script portion of bitcoin transactions. Now the part you host on Github or other platforms is just the JS script that fetches your transactions from online blockchain explorers.
Use localbitcoins.com to trade cash for bitcoin face to face. Just trade $10.
The idea being that it's easier to pass around a JS script than the corpus of a blog. And platforms like Github are probably less likely to remove your pages if the potentially-troublesome plaintext of your blog isn't actually in their database. And the purpose of storing the data on the blockchain is so you don't have to keep rehosting content as it gets taken down.
I'll admit this is more of a fun weekend project (storing stuff on the blockchain with a JS script that can fetch and present it) that I've repurposed as an answer.