Alex Kuck and Nick Skelsey produced this paper as a senior thesis under the guidance of Dave Evans and advice of abhi shelat. It is appearing in the 2016 issue of The Spectra.

Abstract

Recent approaches to resisting censorship on the Internet have focused on restoring access to services that have been blocked. These services, including social media and web forums, provide platforms for activists to spread information to the general public, but the services themselves are subject to manipulation and control. Instead of taking this approach, we have created a resilient platform to share and disseminate information over the Internet without a central authority. Our application, Ombuds, does this by distributing public statements through a peer-to-peer network and storing those statements in a single shared history.

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Prior Work

There are quite a few projects from which we have taken ideas, concepts, and source code -- legally. The big ones are:

  • (Ab)using Bitcoin for an Anti-Censorship Tool

    Krzystof created a specificiation of Bitcoin and analyzed the relative costs of storing data in Bitcoin's block chain.

  • Btcd

    The developers at Conformal have developed some awesome bitcoin libraries. We have used them extensively.

  • Bitchirp

    The original distributed version of twitter.

  • Bitmessage

    Another messaging tool that encrypts messages preflight.

  • CounterParty

    Our bitcoin daemon and database schema was inspired by the schema PhantomPhreak created for CounterParty.

  • Proof of Existence

    The first tool we were aware of that uses the blockchain for its distrbuted timestamp and data storage.

  • Twister

    The intended use case of this project and ours is similar. We elected to use bitcoin's infrastructure intead of setting up our own. But if this project has interested you, then Twister should as well.