Blockchain'south potential to sustain a distributed, tamper-proof infrastructure for commonage digital memory has taken on an unexpected political salience for citizens in Hong Kong.

Shortly after Hong Kong'due south public broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong, or RTHK, revealed its intent to erase any archived content older than 1 year, residents hurried to salve a trove of by news footage that had until now been freely available to the public. The reason for their haste was the recognition that RTHK'south archive contains critical coverage of the recent years of anti-authoritarian struggles and protests that were initially sparked by the introduction of the draconian national security constabulary, also as prove of these struggles' cruel repression.

The fight over the collective tape of the by has long been underway at an official level, encapsulated by the Hong Kong police'due south attempt to rewrite the narrative of one of the almost violent and traumatic episodes in the 2019 protests: an indiscriminate attack on civilians at the suburban subway station Yuen Long. RTHK's impartial coverage of that episode will exist among the content lost to oblivion now that incremental deletion is underway.

Against this backdrop, a blockchain platform that offset emerged at the height of the protestation motility is at present poised to provide citizens and activists with the vital means to reclaim and preserve their recent political history in its integrity.

The platform, called LikeCoin, is a blockchain-based decentralized publishing infrastructure that provides a decentralized registry for all mode of content. Its features enable Hong Kongers to coordinate their efforts to archive now-endangered records across 1 distributed and tamper-proof collective database.

Rather than storing the information itself, LikeCoin registers the metadata — i.e., data regarding the content'due south author, championship, publication date and location. Information technology likewise stamps each entry with a unique and immutable digital fingerprint: an International Standard Content Number, or ISCN, similar to a volume'south ISBN.

The platform'due south founder, Kin Ko, told reporters that while downloading and saving content in an ad-hoc manner may aid citizens to resist official censorship of history to an extent, proving the authenticity and integrity of that data in the future will be more problematic. He explained:

"If you're the person who backed it up, you lot tin can expect through the hard disk. But what if you're not that person? Or what if your hard disk has broken? [...] How do you know that [backed up] photo is the same photograph taken ten years agone? How practice yous know there hasn't been extra piece of work done to it?"

With LikeCoin's blockchain infrastructure, in 10 (or however many) years from now, it will be possible to know whether or non the content has been tampered with past tracking any changes to its digital fingerprint. When it comes to historically significant archived video footage, that could offer a clue that the original file may accept been reedited in a deliberately misleading style.

LikeCoin uses its ain blockchain to avert the loftier transaction costs of a network like Ethereum at such a calibration. Backing upwardly a country's recent political history is no small affair. Ethereum had, in a more than express context, memorably been used to publish and preserve a single letter by Chinese #MeToo activists battling authorities censorship.