2018-12-22 21:22 |
News Article Is Stored On The Ethereum Blockchain With the Help From Civil
A first has happened using the Ethereum blockchain. A news article has been completely stored on the blockchain. The editor of Popula, Maria Bustillos, a journalist-owned site, has recently announced that an article from the Death and Taxes magazine’s site was stored in its entirety in the blockchain.
The IPFS protocol and the Ethereum blockchain were used for the transference. This way, the article will persist on the blockchain forever… or at least while they exist.
According to Bustillos, the goal of the project was to preserve this articles and the journalist had this idea ever since 2012 or 2013, which was when she started to work with Bitcoin and the crypto and blockchain world for the first time.
She affirms that even as early as that time she believed that the blockchain technology could be used to decentralize the world and to produce records that could not be easily corrupted or changed. It was evident to her, as a journalist, that this was an important technology that could easily be used as a tool for press freedom and to protect the rights of the citizens for free speech.
Bustillos cited many libraries being destroyed all over the world as part of the reason why the immutable ledger of the cryptocurrencies is so important. According to her, this is now the first time in which someone can create absolute records that are not easy to destroy or to corrupt while the ledger is still working.
As the ledger is decentralized, it depends on a lot of people and this is reason enough for the blockchain to exist forever in her views. Using this technology, for her, can be considered an important turning point in how information is kept.
Civil Helped To Put The Article On The BlockchainA blockchain journalism startup named Civil was very important for Popula to put the article on the blockchain. The startup used its team and its technology and the whole process was mostly made using MetaMask.
According to reports from the people involved in the action, it was actually far easier than any of them expected. According to Bustillos, the archiving was basically ready in about an hour. Now, every article published on Popula so far will eventually be stored on the blockchain, generally 90 days after the publication.
There are still a lot to do, though, as no viewer for the articles has been implemented yet. It is harder to do it because not only the text of the article was stored on the blockchain, but its whole digital signature was stored as a hash using the blockchain technology.
According to Bustillos, digital signatures are very important, but having the text also is because it is easier for anyone to read without using any specific program. Once you put the text on the blockchain, you can never erase it again.
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