After Trump's account was blocked, a large number of users flocked to the blockchain network

Note: The original author is Nathaniel Popper, a New York Times reporter and the author of Digital Gold: The Untold Story of Bitcoin.

This month, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey publicly discussed whether Twitter had exercised too much power by deleting Trump's account. In Dorsey's view, the solution to this power imbalance may be new technology inspired by Bitcoin.

When YouTube and Facebook banned tens of thousands of Trump supporters and white supremacists this month, many people flocked to alternative apps such as LBRY, Minds and Sessions. What these sites have in common is that they were inspired by the design of Bitcoin.

They all seek to replace some fundamental components of the internet in ways that are difficult for tech giants like Facebook and Google to control.

To do this, these alternative applications are increasingly focusing on the new technological ideas introduced by Bitcoin, which build on the most basic online networks designed to decentralize power.

Unlike other types of digital currencies, Bitcoin is not created and moved by a central bank or financial institution, but by a wide and decentralized network of computers. This is similar to the way Wikipedia is edited, where anyone can edit entries, rather than by a single publisher. This underlying technology is called blockchain, and all Bitcoin records are kept on its blockchain ledger.

Some startups are looking to use blockchain and similar technologies to create social media networks, store online content and host websites without any central authority, making it difficult for any government or company to ban users' accounts or remove content.

These experiments have taken on new significance after the tech giants’ recent thunderous exercise of their privilege.

After the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, Facebook and Twitter immediately blocked Trump from posting messages online, saying it violated regulations on inciting violence. Amazon, Apple and Google have successively stopped cooperating with the social networking site Parler, saying the app did not do enough to restrict violent content.

While libertarians and opponents of harmful content have praised the companies’ actions, they have been criticized by conservatives, First Amendment scholars and the American Civil Liberties Union for allowing private entities to decide who can and cannot go online.

In this regard, LBRY founder Jeremy Kauffman said:

“Even if you agree with specific decisions, I no longer trust those who make the decisions to make the generally correct decisions.”

This has prompted a scramble to find alternatives. So far, dozens of startups have offered alternatives to tech giants such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Amazon, all of which are based on decentralized networks and shared ledgers. According to data company SimilarWeb, many alternative websites have gained millions of new users in the past few weeks.

Data scientist Emmi Bevensee commented:

“This is the biggest wave I’ve seen, it’s been discussed in niche communities, but now we’re having a conversation with the broader world about how these emerging technologies are impacting the world on a pretty large scale.”

Bitcoin was created in 2009 by an anonymous figure named Satoshi Nakamoto, and its central idea is to allow anyone to open a digital bank account and control their own funds.

In its early stages, Bitcoin attracted little attention beyond a small group of online admirers and those who wanted to buy illegal drugs online, but as its price rose, more people in Silicon Valley took notice of the technology behind the cryptocurrency, which some believe could be used to redesign everything from product tracking to online gaming.

These products long failed to gain traction as the technology underlying bitcoin proved slow, error-prone and inaccessible, but improvements and more investment are starting to produce some software that people can actually use.

Last year, the blockchain-based permanent storage project Arweave stored some very sensitive documents.

Minds, a blockchain app founded in 2015 as an alternative to Facebook, has also become an online home for some right-wingers and neo-Nazis, who have been targeted by governments along with fringe groups in other countries. Minds and other similar startups have received investment from prominent venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures.

Dorsey, 44, is one of the trend's biggest backers, having spoken about the promise of decentralized social networking through Twitter and promoted bitcoin through Square, another company he runs.

Dorsey's public support for Bitcoin and Bitcoin-related designs dates back to around 2017. At the end of 2019, Dorsey also announced the "Blue Sky" project, which aims to reduce the power of Twitter.

After shutting down Trump's account this month, Dorsey said he would hire a team to address decentralization issues for Blue Sky. Twitter declined to make Dorsey available for an interview but said it planned to share progress soon.

For those seeking alternatives to tech giants, blockchain is not the only solution. Recently, many people have migrated to encrypted messaging apps Signal and Telegram, which do not require blockchain. Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of Signal, once said that decentralization makes it difficult to build good software.

Still, experiments with decentralized systems have seen a lot of growth over the past month. Web 3 browser Brave announced last week that it would integrate the IPFS system into its software to make web content more reliable in case a large service provider goes out of business or tries to ban its website.

Brave co-founder Brian Bondy commented:

“The IPFS network allows people to access content even when it is censored by corporations and nation states.”

LBRY, a blockchain app that aims to replace YouTube, said its developers saw a 250% surge in daily sign-ups this month compared with December, with new users appearing to be mostly Trump fans, white supremacists and people who have violated YouTube’s rules.

Last week, when YouTube removed the latest video from the white supremacist video blog Way of the World, its creator tweeted:

"Why are we wasting our time on this globalist scum? Come to LBRY to watch all my videos in HD quality, totally uncensored!"

Megan Squires, an Elon University professor who studies new computer networks, warned that blockchain-based networks generally face obstacles because the underlying technology makes it difficult for them to exercise any control over content.

She said:

“As a technology, it’s cool, but you can’t just sit there and be a Pollyanna and think that all information should be free, there will be racists, people will be shooting each other, it’s going to be chaos.”

Kauffman argues that LBRY is prepared for these situations, and while anyone can create an account on the LBRY blockchain and upload content that the company can't delete (similar to how anyone can create an email address and send emails), most people only access videos through its parent website. This allows LBRY to enforce moderation policies, he said, just as Google can filter out spam and illegal content in gmail. Still, Kauffman said, no one will lose basic online conversation channels.

“I would be proud of almost any marginalized voice using it, no matter how much I disagree with it.”