I had an idea last night, and I hope someone who knows a bit more about coding and blockchain technology will see this and help the idea grow in one way or another.

To give a quick run-down, blockchain technology is the term for a system of decentralized book-keeping. Individual people set up "nodes" on their computers, each of which contains the entire ledger, or blockchain, and each updates in real time, or each time the node is specifically activated and updated.

This creates the opportunity for decentralized networks, since there is no way to hack, alter, or remove the blockchain unless it was done on all of the participating nodes simultaneously.

This is what allows (some) cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin to remian largely decentralized and secure. You couldn't hack into bitcoin directly, since any illegal change made to one node would simply cut that node off from the rest of the network. Everyone would see that there was a discrepancy, and so the network would just move on without that node, unchanged. EVEN IF, somehow, the whole network was attacked, everyone participating could collectively agree to start again right where they left off before the attack. All of the previous information would still be stored somewhere.

But it isn't just currencies that can be supported by blockchains.

On each "block" of the blockchain (think of it like pages in a ledger), information is recorded. That information, as I said above, is permanently saved on the computer of everyone running a node for that blockchain. Even if the computer goes offline, everything that happened before will be saved, and once it goes back online, it can sync with the other nodes in order to be updated with any new information that was stored.

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE NEED. Videos are being deleted. Articles and posts are being taken down. The truth is being scrubbed from the internet and from our history books. Blockchain technology can prevent that.

If we set up a blockchain, not for a cryptocurrency, but for recording information, then whatever we put on it could potentially be there FOREVER, and no single person or organization could remove it. Even if they cut everyone in the world off from the internet entirely, the information would still be saved on the computers of every node user. Entire articles could be written on each block. Videos could be encoded in such a way that they could be uploaded at a later time with the right video players. We could save information permanently, not on some website owned by some organization or person, but on a ledger owned by everyone.

This is what we need to protect ourselves from the scrubbing of history. Please, if you like this idea, either let me know your thoughts here, PM me your thoughts, or just get out there and start making this yourself (I'm not as fluent in any particular coding language as I'd like to be, despite knowing a lot of the basic concepts involved).

And please, I know that many of you have your own conspiracy theories about Bitcoin and NSA-created hashing algorithms and whatnot. That's not what this post is about, and blockchain technology by itself is separate from all of that. We wouldn't need to use any of the NSA's tools to pull this off if we did it right. So if you are going to criticize this idea, please make sure you know a good amount about blockchains before you do.

I don't know the best place to start something like this, but I know all of you will recognize how important it could be. Let's take the information, and thus the power, out of their hands and put it into the hands of, well, everyone!