Blockchains haven't only revolutionized history, they have also revolutionized how the history will be written.
By now pretty much everybody knows that Satoshi Nakamoto, inventor of Bitcoin, is a genius. He made a world's first cryptocurrency. But to be able to do that, he had to invent blockchain technology first, which is basically a way of storing immutable information. Satoshi used the technology to build a currency that can be trusted even when users don't know each others. But it can also do a lot more.
You have probably heard phrases like "winners write the history" or "history is the propaganda of the victors". When a group wins a war or acquires political power, they can dictate how the events will be documented. They can destroy evidence that implies that they did something wrong and replace it with something that shows how glorious their victory was.
But not anymore! Now we have this cool technology, the blockchain, which gives us possibility to store any kind of information with an assurance that it won't be changed. When a text is stored in a blockchain, it will stay there forever. Nobody can rewrite it.
I think it's Nassim Taleb who has recommended that if you want to understand how historical events really happened, you should read diaries. In a diary events are written as they happen. When it's done afterwards, the writer usually adds his own interpretations to the text. It will often cause hiding some important facts or adding biased views, even when the author tries to be objective.
With blockchain everybody has a chance to write their own diaries, without fearing that they will be destroyed, censored or changed. When it's in a blockchain, the whole world can read it.
This will be hugely beneficial tool for civilians who suffer in violent events like wars. Nowadays pretty much everybody has a camera and a computer, which they can use to record who is actually behaving violently, causing misery and ruining the society.
Unfortunately pictures and videos are still too big to store in the blockchain, but it's possible to share them with torrents or magnet links. With p2p-technology the files can be shared globally very fast. When the torrent is published in the blockchain, other people can trust to download exactly the files that the original author intended. In the future there will be better tools, like InterPlanetary File System (IPFS).
With blockchain it's quite easy to build a war criminal databases. It will take time until people take this seriously, but in the future it will be more and more harder to cover who did what in a violent event. One fine example is Bellingcat group that has made great work analyzing evidence, like photos from social media, that proves the involvement of Russian army in the shooting down of MH17 in Ukraine.
From now on invaders can't just march in, take over and claim that everything happened peacefully. Openness is the best weapon against evil-doers. Those who behave badly will have to face the consequences of their actions because they can't hide them anymore. They can't rewrite the history.
This is where Steem comes into play. Steem is the first blockchain designed for common people to publish information easily. We, the early adopters of Steem, are used to play with this like any other social media platform. But because it's build on a blockchain, it's much more powerful than it might look at first sight.
The pen is mightier than the sword. Steem takes that to extremes. Steem is like a pen made of valyrian steel.
If any of you, who are reading this, have friends or relatives in area that's suffering because of violent conflict, I suggest that you tell them about Steem. Ask them to publish evidence of violence, bombings, movements of armed individuals and vehicles, etc. Even photos that seem insignificant at first might become valuable evidence for example for following movements of terrorists or other evil people.
In the future there might be a separate user interface for Steem blockchain that is intended for publishers of sensitive material. It would be useful to have clear guides how to handle the publishing, how to use IPFS and torrents and how to make sure that the publisher can stay anonymous if needed.
This time the revolution will not be only televised. It will be also documented and timestamped in the blockchain so that the next generation will know what really happened.
Nobody knows how the future will unfold. But I predict that Steem become a very useful tool for achieving the world peace. If we want to punish evil-doers, we have to know who did what. It is something that Steem can help us to document.
---
If you are new to the blockchain world, I highly recommend this video by James D'Angelo. It's old – he talks about putting text into blockchain like it's a miracle, which might seem funny for steemians as we do it every day – but he explains very well how blockhains work.
PS. Steem is also a payment network. It can be really beneficial for people who need to flee from war or other violence. It's so much easier to leave when you can have digital money with you, like Steem dollars or other cryptocurrencies, in your mobile phone. Even if the invaders take everything you have, you still keep the ownership of your Steem wallet (as long as you remember the password). And of course you can use Steem to ask for help.