Using Bitcoin to help minorities in East Asian State.

[BorealUS]

Please understand that I must be vague in some aspects for fear of my well being, as I have developed a software building on Bitcoin that takes some power away from a state to control undesirable minorities.

Threat Model: Keeping State Actors from shutting out individuals from economic activity (based on a real example)

Hello,

last year I was loosely chatting with a person from a country with dictatorial streaks. He told me that because he was a critic of the state, he has great difficulty buying things on the internet and in person, because his account from a popular payment app was being restricted.

He had access to cryptocurrency but it was hard for him to find people that would be willing to sell to him, as they would not list their wares online for fear of it being known that they sell to oppressed minorities. It was all word of mouth.

So I developed an application based on a new protocol that allows people to safely and securely list their wares so that minorities like him can buy them.

The trick is that all their listings are encoded in the Bitcoin Blockchain itself. It is stenography in the blockchain. So as long as he has access to his cryptocurrency, he can see the listings and participate in normal market activity that the state wants to keep him from. I have published the tool for transparency here:

https://git.tchncs.de/BorealUS/blockaze

There are also public faucets and websites available, thanks to the community, which you can find but I will not advertise here. I have documented everything as well as I can so that if I am not here anymore a strong individual can continue. Please back up the code yourself too if you can, because this easily directs the ire of said state at me.

[NotATether]

That's actually a pretty neat idea, but have you thought about making a web-based-version that runs as a Tor onion service? They are specifically designed for running these type of applications.

Then you can find some anonymous hosting and run the tool yourself, so that people can easily use it not only on their desktops and laptops, but also on their mobile devices too.

[BorealUS]

Hello NotATether,

this is already happening. Curageous members of the community are hosting various services, where you can send RPC calls for free and receive responses back.

For example:

https://moofetch.mooo.com

There are websites that are using these services to have their inventory and buyers history "in the cloud" via the Bitcoin blockchain. And others just send RPC calls directly. Because I cannot restrict what people encode, the stuff you find there is completely free and unregulated But I think this is a necessary tradeoff, as that freedom is needed for some people across the world. Please understand that this puts me in the target of not just the aformentioned country, but also Western democratic states. But I believe the overall mission is more important than myself.

I have created a very extensive documentation here:
https://moofetch.mooo.com/documentation_blockaze/