There exists a long history of censorship resistant and privacy preserving technologies: Signal for messaging, Bittorrent for file-sharing, Tor for web browsing. Like bitcoin, these tools are not built for the mainstream. Most people would rather use faster, slicker, glossier centralized alternatives like Facebook Message, Dropbox, and Google Chrome. But for censored people and organizations, decentralized technologies have always provided an escape hatch. For as long as they have existed, these tools have brought with them a certain level of societal discomfort. This discomfort stems not from these platforms being lawless domains — regulations exist on the dark web as much as they do in any jurisdiction – but rather from the difficulty these platforms present in enforcing these government policies and social norms. These technologies render censored activities more difficult to stop.
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