A student and an advisor from Florida International University in Miami have utilized the Litecoin network to publish a staggering number of BBC news articles. Over the course of 134 days, they were able to publish 402 articles per day, totaling 53,823 articles by the end of the project.
They developed UWeb, a blockchain-based storage system that charges publishers to self-sustain its decentralized infrastructure. UWeb organizes blockchain-stored content for easy retrieval and enables clients to store and access content with provable anonymity, privacy and censorship-resistance properties.
They were able to obtain permission from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to reproduce the web articles (only text) into the Litecoin blockchain. They created a crawler that grabbed the articles (also removed the ads) from all public BBC’s RSS feeds every day for 134 consecutive days.
They published a report on their findings in Sciendo which is an online open-access academic publishing platform that provides a range of publishing services for academic journals and books.
The cost of this massive publication endeavor was a mere .57 Litecoin, showcasing the cost-effective and efficient nature of using Litecoin for hard-to-censor publishing. They selected the Litecoin network since it provided an equivalent network to Bitcoin at a fraction of the cost.
Their main reason for conducting real net experiments on Litecoin instead of Bitcoin is that Litecoin allowed them to perform more experiments for the same amount of money. While Litecoin is identical to Bitcoin in terms of most technical aspects, including priority policy to choose transactions for mining, they acknowledge that Bitcoin’s longer confirmation interval would impose longer confirmation times on all transactions, including max-rate transactions.
This project is a prime example of the versatility of Litecoin and how it can be utilized for a variety of purposes beyond just financial transactions. The decentralized nature of the Litecoin network ensured that the publications were easily accessible to a global audience, without the need for intermediaries.
The low cost and high efficiency of the Litecoin network make it an attractive option for similar projects in the future.
A presentation was given titled "Toward Uncensorable, Anonymous and Private Access Over Satoshi Blockchains" on the project.
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