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posted by takyon on Friday November 02 2018, @08:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the Doge-coin-in-my-wallet dept.

From the very richest Forbes Magazine (reprint) come news of a nefarious plot:

There's no better example of the power, and the terror, inspired by blockchain than Gab.com, the social network used by the accused Pittsburgh synagogue gunman to threaten Jews.

About a month and a half before the alleged gunman made good on those threats by opening fire in a Pittsburgh synagogue and killing 11 people, Gab submitted paperwork to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to raise $10 million via an initial coin offering (ICO). The offering, dated September 18, 2018, has so far received commitments to raise $5.6 million in capital for the "free speech" social network, which is a favorite of white supremacists, neo-Nazis and other members of the "alt-right."

Since the shooting on Saturday, Gab has been shut down by a host of mainstream services including payment processors Stripe and Paypal, Web-hosting company Joyent and briefly, domain registry GoDaddy. But that might not matter, because Gab has already taken the first step toward freeing itself from dependence on traditional infrastructure and support mechanisms, thanks to its funding via the ethereum blockchain. Ultimately Gab's goal is to build an entire ecosystem beyond the reach of centralized authorities—whether Facebook, Twitter or venture capitalists—making it nearly indestructible. On this, the tenth anniversary of the publication of Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper, which gave birth to bitcoin, Gab epitomizes the darker consequences of his vision.

[...] Gab can also use other blockchain services if mainstream providers try to kick it off the internet by refusing to provide critical services. If Gab needs to replace GoDaddy for domain service (the addresses people use to find websites), Ethereum Name Service provides domains for decentralized applications built on the ethereum blockchain. Web hosting? No problem. Ethereum's Substratum provides a decentralized alternative to Joyent. Others have already pioneered the idea. PeepEth is a nascent ethereum-powered social network, and Mastadon is a blockchain-based Twitter.

Previously: Social Media and the Pittsburgh Shooter: Gab.com Going Down


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday November 02 2018, @06:54PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday November 02 2018, @06:54PM (#757001) Journal

    Someone asked weev about gab.

    The Southern Poverty Law Center says weev is bad. What's your hot take on this?

    Weev said that the content is shit and the people running it can't build communities

    Did GoDaddy, Stripe, and other companies deplatform Gab for those reasons? No, it took a mass shooting and fear of bad publicity to take down Gab. Otherwise, Gab would still be running today, regardless of whether the content was shit.

    A real problem is that the top social media platforms like Facebook/Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter get most of the attention. Dailymotion, Vimeo, etc. get ignored because the action and attention is at YouTube. Yet those sites still manage to exist. The alt-right niche of Gab may have hurt its growth, but it was still around.

    Go cry some more pussy

    You sure you're replying to the right comment? I don't care about Gab. It was an imperfect platform because it was able to be taken down like this. Something more like Diaspora or Freenet would be a better idea than Gab. But it still has to gain a lot of users for it to become useful.

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