Hong Kong Citizens Using Blockchain To Save Proof Of Anti-Authoritarian Struggles

Hong Kong natives are using a blockchain based system to fight back against the government’s efforts to delete and overwrite the history of recent years’ anti-authoritarian encounters.

Immediately after Hong Kong’s public broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) divulged its aim to wipe off any logged content older than one year, locals rushed to save a trove of past news footage that had until now been freely accessible by the public.

In Hong Kong, the struggle over the collective record of the past has long been underway at an official level. A blockchain platform, dubbed LikeCoin, came up at the height of the remonstration and is now providing natives and activists with a crucial means to claim back and safeguard their up to date political history in its integrity.

Kin Ko, the founder of the platform, explained,

“If you’re the person who backed it up, you can look 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 photo taken 10 years ago? How do you know there hasn’t been extra work done to it?”

Notably, LikeCoin uses its own blockchain in order to circumvent the high transaction costs of a network like Ethereum at such a scale. Backing up a nation’s recent political history is no small matter. In a more limited context, Ethereum had memorably been used to publish and safeguard a single letter by Chinese #MeToo activists fighting against government censorship.