It was the night before Christmas. Bitcoin rises in price. Crypto analysts are trading in peace then suddenly, Youtubers realise that YouTube had removed their videos on cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin, Cardano, IOTA, and others) from its platform.
At least six cryptocurrency YouTube channels report that their content has been removed. The removals were made under the site’s “harmful and dangerous” policy. One Youtuber states that Youtube tagged his video as “sale of regulated goods”. Some YouTube channels have reported bans.
The YouTube crypto-purge may not come as a surprise to experts on the digital economy and blockchain technology.
In his book, ‘Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy’, economist and investor George Gilder asserts that blockchain technology could solve the big data problems which many tech companies have not been able to gain an adequate grasp of. Blockchain could give internet users more power over the security and management of their data. This presents a feat which Google has not been able to achieve despite its many incredible achievements for mankind.
Gilder says,
“Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, et al. collected more and more private data and protected them with firewalls and encryption. But as time passed, they discovered that centralization is not safe. Putting data in central repositories solved hackers’ hardest problem for them: It told them which data were important and where they were, putting the entire Internet at risk.”
Blockchain technology removes the need for a central authority. is not needed for an efficient ecosystem. Instead of the regulation (such as that exhibited through YouTube’s crypto-purge), industries innovate, with certainty that the technological infrastructure on which they innovate on is adequately designed to mitigate many risks which regulators usually try (to no success) to solve.
“The Internet stack had become a porous and perforated scheme in which most of the money and power could be sucked up by the big apps at the top run by companies such as Google. What was needed was a blockstack that could keep the crucial IDs and personal data and pointers to storage addresses in a secure and immutable database on the blockchain.”
Social media site, Twitter has chosen to take a different approach. Recently, Tim Draper announced that Twitter will become more decentralised. He made the announcement after Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey tweeted that Twitter would follow the Bitcoin standard. Dorsey is forming a team to create decentralised solutions for the platform.
