Message on college sexual harassment in China copied to ETH blockchain after officials try to delete it

There has been a wave of sexual harassment cases exposure all over the world, and China has not been the country which missed it. The local college student Yue Xin has posted the information about the perverted behavior of the establishment employees on the Internet, but they quickly discovered this and started to press her even using her parents. The authorities tried to downplay the incident and delete the mentionings of this online. Someone tech-savvy enough has cut this Gordian knot by simply inserting the original post in the blockchain of Ethereum. To see the text in Chinese, one should switch to the Overview tab and click “Convert to UTF-8”.

As a reminder, cryptocurrency blockchains can store input information in the form of various text messages once a completely new block is mined. This data cannot be deleted and changed and can be stored for years. As a result, Bitcoin fans can still know what message Satoshi Nakamoto has left in one of the first blocks, and Chinese authorities cannot delete the information they deem unacceptable to publish. There is a downside: the blockchain of Bitcoin also contains links to the information which is prohibited in most civilized countries.

This perfectly demonstrates one of the biggest advantages of the blockchain technologies without even building any new software structure or environment.

Image courtesy of Scott Rettberg / Flickr