What if a corrupted government was also blocking access to freedom of speech and querying some harder-to-block public, immutable database on a blockchain was effectively circumventing this block?

Yeah, it's technically still breaking the law and it could be blocked too (albeit much harder), though it's for a good cause.

It's magnitudes more expensive to keep putting them up than to take them down.

This reads a bit like when, as a child, we'd discuss who would win in a fight, Goku or Superman.

I doubt bitcoin 'billionaires' would put more up, because liquidating that much bitcoin would crash their market (considering >70% of trades on exchanges are wash trades) and require them to go against tragedy of the commons.

You've either missed the point or are intentionally ignoring the context, because "China did something" is actually "China successfully shut down bitcoin mining inside it's borders and has the capabilities to shut down these satellites if it chose to do so".

That's not debating super heroes or even saying other countries will do it. If China saw these as a problem, they will likely deal with them.

Let's say (company names are just examples, I don't necessarily think those particular companies will do it) government-controlled ISPs blocked access to the core protocol. Google (over SSL + Secure /Encrypted DNS) might provide a gateway. GitHub can. Microsoft can. Apple can. AWS can. Facebook can. What can the government do then? Blocking those is effectively blocking the whole Internet. Eventually governments will realize that it can't be practically blocked.

One of those things seem more likely than the other.

They will eventually have to embrace it, or collapse economically.

there's a reason why Orwell said a boot stamping a human face forever instead of a boot stamping a human face until it became economically disadvantageous to do so.

More constellations are underway: https://observer.com/2021/11/boeing-astra-space-startups-eye...

Starlink transforms the internet more than people realize

Then they are left with chasing anyone who has any radio equipment outside the cities.

That's incredible potential! I better get in now and shill a bit on HN to convince people that it's a good investment so that the price goes up.

Platformless internet, whats what people mean by web3 and I’m here for it

A public utility that can just be optionally used no matter what people think of you

edit, ok, tor appeared with web2.0, but still it is more of a web 1.3.

ISPs can deplatform

ICANN and ENOM can deplatform

Nations can force them to deplatform and effectively censor

your web 1.0 server can be unreachable or unable to serve data

a TOR onion service is subject to the same distributed denial of service

Reading from a blockchain is not, and the costs for writing to it are one-off and low

Unlike web3, where they platforms chose to write custom metadata to the blockchain and interpret as they so chose... Oh wait.

there likely will be a day where there is nobody left who knows how to use dominant blockchains and rely on a few company controlled platforms to do everything for them, so there is nobody left to communicate with when using the public utilities in the most raw form.

For now, that's not the case and education is expanding. Not as fast as the uneducated users of blockchains, but some of them dive deeper too.

Even now this is the case. It's a bit more spread because many people jump on the bandwagon and try to maximize their scams^W profits.

But then you get news like "Peter Molyneux releasing next game on Gala Games platform", and this is exactly what I'm talking about.

It doesn't matter how many users and devs you "educate". If Platform X doesn't recognize Platform Y's metadata, no amount of blockchain will help you.

> Assurances that they only need because they're breaking the law. It is well established that blockchains are good to facilitating illegal behavior. This is just a novel way of using them for that purpose

I don't think that describing the mechanisms as facilitating illegal behavior is entirely fair. A better term would be something like "extralegal", which includes illegal behavior as a significant subcategory.

This isn't just sophistry. A significant fraction of the world's population live in places where "rule of law" is at best a polite fiction, or where the legal system is largely captured by a kleptocratic oligarchy[0].

It would be nice if trustless distributed ledgers were actually being used to do things like establish property rights and facilitate transactions in places that don't have, for example, a functioning land registry or the equivalent, or at least be shown to be useful to bootstrap that sort of thing into existence (collectible NFTs and virtual real estate are only baby steps in that direction), but it is true that the 'good' edge cases of establishing immutable ground truths that cannot be erased by fiat/regime change/interregnum are legitimate though largely theoretical[1].

Meanwhile, we're left with the definition of "facilitating behaviors that a court can be convinced to disallow, which are mostly, though not entirely, behaviors that are (and most citizens would agree should be) illegal". I can't think of a better concise term than "extralegal" to capture that nuance.

[0] I personally don't subscribe to the belief that this describes most of the industrialized world, whatever some cryptocurrency boosters think, but that's a political matter. Everybody draws the line somewhere, and agrees that some chunks of the world exist on the other side of it.

[1] Cryptocurrencies can also facilitate otherwise legal transactions that are being hindered by extralegal means, such as donations to WikiLeaks during the global payment processor blockade (December 2010 to July 2012).