Part of the reason the blockchain cannot realistically be censored is due to its distributed nature. Yet, that does not protect everything we may wish to share.

I have experienced a wave of censorship hitting some of my posts, and this censorship does not originate on steemit.

If you embed images from a site, and that site goes down or chooses to remove those images then the censorship carries over onto steemit. Your post may be there, but the supporting images may be gone.

Some people have created image hosting services supporting steemit, but they simply used traditional web hosting. They were not distributed on the blockchain. This means that content is subject to censorship if that hosting service is compromised or taken down.

My recent posts were all youtube related, as an apparent attack on the Journalist Ben Swann is occurring due to him posting a rather unbiased video on Pizzagate for CBS 46. Now posts I made referencing his work for the last 7 months no longer have working videos.

We could again create a host and host our own videos, but that still would not be decentralized on the blockchain in any form other than the URL.

To truly be censorship free we need to come up with a way to store images, and videos in the blockchain. This is NOT an easy task as these types of data are far larger than the text it is storing now, and far beyond the size of a block. This is therefore, a daunting task.

In order for the data to be replicated any witnesses/nodes that are replicating the blockchain would see their storage requirements and bandwidth needs increase dramatically.

So it may not be realistic at the moment, but to be truly censorship free we need to be able to eliminate the possibility of censoring content of all forms on Steemit. Though that would also potentially make it a haven for copyright infringement. There are a lot of things to consider.

The recent ghosting of Ben Swann though really drove this point home to me.

Update

Some people suggested bitchute which I had checked out before. Yet I hadn't checked it out closely enough. It might actually be an example of a way we could eliminate this form of censorship. If you know torrents though it still requires that seeds exist. If there are no seeds for a piece of content then the content is gone. So it is not quite as extensive as if that data were permanently on the blockchain. It is a potential step in the right direction. Perhaps if it used seeds and if one doesn't exist had a fall back option to go to one of numerous hosts which could be changed/created etc to retrieve archived data... then the person that downloaded that might become a seed. It'd be a way of reseeding data.

I was reading the bitchute faq:

I cannot overstate the importance of WebTorrent. The Internet is full of centralized monsters and WebTorrent is the magical sword we will use to slay them.

I have not yet determine how we could EMBED such videos in our steemit posts.

Update 2

My friend Hive account@kaptainkrayola just mentioned storj.io for storing data decentralized in the cloud. Not the answer to all of these problems, but it is another piece of the puzzle.

Steem On!