Crypto leaders worry over threat from ‘big tech’ censorship

A change to WhatsApp’s terms of service has triggered a mass exodus from the messaging platform to more private and independent rivals like Telegram and Signal, which have registered millions of new users over the last week. 

Rather than agreeing to new terms specifying the app’s right to share user data with Facebook, millions of WhatsApp users simply gave up using the platform, abandoning it for less-intrusive competitors. Telegram alone has been downloaded 25 million times in the last 72 hours.

Telegram surpassed 500 million active users. 25 million new users joined in the last 72 hours: 38% came from Asia, 27% from Europe, 21% from Latin America and 8% from MENA. https://t.co/1LptHZb9PQ

— Telegram Messenger (@telegram) January 12, 2021

Some of those new sign-ups include refugees from the free speech platform Parler, looking for a way to connect and organize after the right-wing Twitter alternative was suddenly yanked offline by hosting services provider Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Many people on Parler joined Telegram when it started getting banned by Apple and others. Not saying that accounts for the 25 million but there was certainly a big shift over to Telegram. https://t.co/Taxow05M9W

— Yashar Ali (@yashar) January 12, 2021

The ability of web hosting giants like AWS to unilaterally close down sites and infrastructure has some in the cryptocurrency industry worried for the future health of blockchain-related projects.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin described Parler’s takedown as “very worrying” in a series of tweets, noting that AWS was much more of a “common infrastructure provider” than a social media site. Buterin also expressed a certain level of dismay over Twitter’s decision to permanently ban President Donald Trump from its platform:

“The fact that so many people who would normally never support such corporate power are now cheering tech CEOs running roughshod over democratically elected officials deserves some introspection…”

Take Infura and AWS offline and see how decentralized ETH is.

— Stephen Cole (@sthenc) January 12, 2021

In the past, estimates have suggested that around 60% of Ethereum nodes run on AWS.

EOS and Bitshares co-founder Daniel Larimer recently called for the mass abandonment of big social media platforms prior to the takedown of Parler. He correctly predicted that it may have been the “last chance” to download certain social media apps. Larimer recently quit his position as CTO at EOSIO developers block.one, vowing to work on censorship-resistant platforms which he believes will become increasingly important as more people find themselves banned or suspended from traditional platforms.

Other crypto projects are wary of the centralized nature of tech giants like Amazon and anticipate problems relying upon them. The decentralized liquidity network THORChain, for example, incentivizes nodes running its software to avoid AWS by awarding them extra perks for using alternative service providers.

Thorchain continues to decentralize.Thornodes are incentivized not to run on AWS, due to concerns about centralization.250 $RUNE this week. Rewards increase with an additional 250 RUNE per week until AWS THORNodes are below 33% of the network. pic.twitter.com/4OG88Ao22s

— Bitcoin_Sage⚡ (@Bitcoin_Sage) January 12, 2021

Decentralized solutions providers, like domain name server Handshake, are censorship-resistant in that they avoid reliance on classical processes for domain name resolution. Pirate academic journal archivists Sci-Hub switched DNS providers using Handshake, as mentioned by Buterin.

For now. But this will be a boon for the open web, decentralized tools and networks. Short-term concentration will lead to long-term diffusion. Antifragility isn't free. https://t.co/f0u6Ln3XXj

— jm (@_nonlinear) January 9, 2021

Censorship concerns aren’t the only reason why reliance on a single hosting service provider poses risks to crypto-based services. In November, AWS outages affected Coinbase, causing users to have problems logging in to and navigating their accounts.