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We must do things, I have been sometimes told, because everyone is doing them.

At an early age, I was first exposed to this sort of reasoning, and the reverse of the coin: we must not do things because nobody is doing them. It struck me as a weak argument. I made a mental note, never to use it.

But it is stronger than first appears. If the great majority in any society were to do entirely as they pleased, we would have anarchy: genuine anarchy, not the kind that Hollywood celebrates in movies. Ones life would be worth little, and anyone who wished to survive to the end of the day would go about heavily armed.

Perhaps thats why God made most of us conformists, why the world is discernibly ordered, and man is able, however vaguely, to distinguish up from down, good from evil, the beautiful from the ugly and so forth. But God also gave us freedom, and the consequences of our choices, not only to ourselves but to others.

Gentle reader may suspect that I am making an argument for censorship. I am.

It is in the nature of any culture, society, civilization (choose your weapon) to introduce signposts. Focus our eyes, and we may see them everywhere, even along paved roads. We have laws, too, not always hung in signs, but available for public inspection. And there are unwritten laws.

Consider the law, Thou shalt do no murder. This has been spelled out in detail, with exceptions, and acts of murder may be tried in our courts, but we didnt actually invent the law. It was written into our hearts; it was inscribed on a tablet to Moses long before we were born.

We use the criminal code merely to finesse this natural law; we use lawyers and legislators to get around it, should it turn out to be inconvenient in certain circumstances. Abortion, euthanasia, and whatever will come next, are now among our exceptions.

Freedom is our watchword. Freedom from children, freedom from grandparents always assuming they are unwanted are now among our man-made goods. Freedom from such constraints as being a man or a woman, or being rich or poor, or from any other accident of our being, have been added to the watch list.

It is true there are some traditionalists like me, who regret the overthrow of the moral order, and sometimes even those who support it have twangs of conscience that need to be suppressed. But in the main, society is progressive. We go along to get along.

In the olden time I refer here to very deep ancient history, going back to my childhood we went along with ideas wed inherited, and kept our little murders to ourselves. Today, we have begun to put them on Facebook.

Why not?

Recently a younger acquaintance decided to have herself killed. She had cancer; things were not looking up. Her case shocked me in two especial ways. One, she was a brave soul, who was doing a sterling job of facing down adversity. Two, she was what we call a conservative, who had cheerfully taken heat for various politically incorrect views. She even had Christian tendencies.

Yet she suddenly opted for the exit plan, and quickly found support among her friends, who gathered round the execution bed with smiles of encouragement. When Id queried her life/death choice privately, her argument was in effect, Everyone is doing it.

The stigma had lapsed, gone. The advocates for killing off the old and the ill, even the young and depressive, had overturned the stigma. This made overturning the law a cinch. And by the time the law had been changed, demeaning human life becoming an important step forward, the bulk of society had come round.

Everyone is doing it, in a certain sense. It is convenient. They dont all have themselves executed, for some human instincts have survived, but this everyone would like to have the option should they ever find themselves desiring it.

Pain is no fun. I admit that. The notion that it could have not only a physical, but a moral purpose, has been extinguished. The idea that suicide is self-murder is now taken to be ridiculous. The old laws that banned it could not be enforced (the person who commits suicide has gotten away with it, from a glib point of view). They could only punish those who assisted.

Many things once unthinkable were thinkable all along. Murder is a good example. Infanticide, for instance, is something that must have occurred to many mothers, in moments of child rearing. But one throws a fit instead, perhaps breaks something, or makes a joke of it. You wouldnt actually do what was unthinkable.

It was unthinkable, narrowly, because the laws of God were reinforced by the laws of the State, and of the culture. You did not go there because, Nobody goes there. Except those who do, and become infamous as a consequence.

Among the travesties of the Right (well leave the Left alone for a brief moment) is that censorship is the enemy of freedom. Those on this side are inclined to argue that everyone has the right to his opinion, except those who cry Fire! in cinemas. Let any who disagree with anything make their argument, and then we will vote.

We should have learned, in our wild ride since the sixties (or from the Garden of Eden, should we wish to trace it back), that this view is nave. Some things ought to remain as unthinkable as they were in those old, oppressively Christian times, when dissent was censored.

There is nothing wrong with censorship. Even those on the Left take pride in what they censor: racism, sexism, transphobia, whatever. Unfortunately, by their perverse definitions, they give censorship a bad name.

The real question is not whether censorship is a good thing, but what we should censor.

*Image:An Unhappy Family or Suicide(Une famille malheureuse ou le Suicide) by Octave Tassaert, 1852[Muse Fabre, Montpellier, France]

2019 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

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On Censorship - The Catholic Thing

The weak and the strong cosmic censorship hypotheses are two mathematical conjectures about the structure of gravitational singularities arising in general relativity.

Singularities that arise in the solutions of Einstein's equations are typically hidden within event horizons, and therefore cannot be observed from the rest of spacetime. Singularities that are not so hidden are called naked. The weak cosmic censorship hypothesis was conceived by Roger Penrose in 1969 and posits that no naked singularities, other than the Big Bang singularity, exist in the universe.

Since the physical behavior of singularities is unknown, if singularities can be observed from the rest of spacetime, causality may break down, and physics may lose its predictive power. The issue cannot be avoided, since according to the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems, singularities are inevitable in physically reasonable situations. Still, in the absence of naked singularities, the universe, as described by the general theory of relativity, is deterministic:[1] it is possible to predict the entire evolution of the universe (possibly excluding some finite regions of space hidden inside event horizons of singularities), knowing only its condition at a certain moment of time (more precisely, everywhere on a spacelike three-dimensional hypersurface, called the Cauchy surface). Failure of the cosmic censorship hypothesis leads to the failure of determinism, because it is yet impossible to predict the behavior of spacetime in the causal future of a singularity. Cosmic censorship is not merely a problem of formal interest; some form of it is assumed whenever black hole event horizons are mentioned.[citation needed]

The hypothesis was first formulated by Roger Penrose in 1969, and it is not stated in a completely formal way. In a sense it is more of a research program proposal: part of the research is to find a proper formal statement that is physically reasonable and that can be proved to be true or false (and that is sufficiently general to be interesting).[2] Because the statement is not a strictly formal one, there is sufficient latitude for (at least) two independent formulations, a weak form, and a strong form.

The weak and the strong cosmic censorship hypotheses are two conjectures concerned with the global geometry of spacetimes.

The weak cosmic censorship hypothesis asserts there can be no singularity visible from future null infinity. In other words, singularities need to be hidden from an observer at infinity by the event horizon of a black hole. Mathematically, the conjecture states that, for generic initial data, the maximal Cauchy development possesses a complete future null infinity.

The strong cosmic censorship hypothesis asserts that, generically, general relativity is a deterministic theory, in the same sense that classical mechanics is a deterministic theory. In other words, the classical fate of all observers should be predictable from the initial data. Mathematically, the conjecture states that the maximal Cauchy development of generic compact or asymptotically flat initial data is locally inextendible as a regular Lorentzian manifold.

The two conjectures are mathematically independent, as there exist spacetimes for which weak cosmic censorship is valid but strong cosmic censorship is violated and, conversely, there exist spacetimes for which weak cosmic censorship is violated but strong cosmic censorship is valid.

The Kerr metric, corresponding to a black hole of mass M {displaystyle M} and angular momentum J {displaystyle J} , can be used to derive the effective potential for particle orbits restricted to the equator (as defined by rotation). This potential looks like:[3]

where r {displaystyle r} is the coordinate radius, e {displaystyle e} and l {displaystyle l} are the test-particle's conserved energy and angular momentum respectively (constructed from the Killing vectors).

To preserve cosmic censorship, the black hole is restricted to the case of a < 1 {displaystyle a<1} . For there to exist an event horizon around the singularity, the requirement a < 1 {displaystyle a<1} must be satisfied.[3] This amounts to the angular momentum of the black hole being constrained to below a critical value, outside of which the horizon would disappear.

The following thought experiment is reproduced from Hartle's Gravity:

Imagine specifically trying to violate the censorship conjecture. This could be done by somehow imparting an angular momentum upon the black hole, making it exceed the critical value (assume it starts infinitesimally below it). This could be done by sending a particle of angular momentum l = 2 M e {displaystyle l=2Me} . Because this particle has angular momentum, it can only be captured by the black hole if the maximum potential of the black hole is less than ( e 2 1 ) / 2 {displaystyle (e^{2}-1)/2} .

Solving the above effective potential equation for the maximum under the given conditions results in a maximum potential of exactly ( e 2 1 ) / 2 {displaystyle (e^{2}-1)/2} . Testing other values shows that no particle with enough angular momentum to violate the censorship conjecture would be able to enter the black hole, because they have too much angular momentum to fall in.

There are a number of difficulties in formalizing the hypothesis:

In 1991, John Preskill and Kip Thorne bet against Stephen Hawking that the hypothesis was false. Hawking conceded the bet in 1997, due to the discovery of the special situations just mentioned, which he characterized as "technicalities". Hawking later reformulated the bet to exclude those technicalities. The revised bet is still open (although Hawking died in 2018), the prize being "clothing to cover the winner's nakedness".[1](see also ThorneHawkingPreskill bet.)

An exact solution to the scalar-Einstein equations R a b = 2 a b {displaystyle R_{ab}=2phi _{a}phi _{b}} which forms a counterexample to many formulations of the cosmic censorship hypothesis was found by Mark D. Roberts in 1985:

where {displaystyle sigma } is a constant.

Read the original here:
Cosmic censorship hypothesis - Wikipedia

Film censorship in the United States was a frequent feature of the industry since almost the beginning of the motion picture industry until the end of strong self-regulation in 1966. Court rulings in the 1950s and 1960s severely constrained government censorship, though statewide regulation lasted until at least the 1980s.

The censorship dates to an 1897 statute of Maine that prohibited the exhibition of prizefight films.[2] Maine enacted the statute to prevent the exhibition of the 1897 heavyweight championship between James J. Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons. Some other states followed the example of Maine.

Chicago enacted the first censorship ordinance in the United States in 1907, authorizing its police chief to screen all films to determine whether they should be permitted on screens. Detroit followed the same year. When upheld in a court challenge in 1909, other cities followed and Pennsylvania became the first to enact state-wide censorship of movies in 1911 (though it did not fund the effort until 1914). It was soon followed by Ohio (1914), Kansas (1915), Maryland (1916), New York (1921) and, finally, Virginia (1922). Eventually, at least one hundred cities across the nation empowered local censorship boards.[3]

In 1915, the US Supreme Court decided the case Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio in which the court determined that motion pictures were purely commerce and not an art and so not covered by the First Amendment. This decision was not overturned until the Supreme Court case, Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson in 1952. Popularly referred to as the "Miracle Decision", the ruling involved the short film "The Miracle", part of Roberto Rossellini's anthology film L'Amore (1948).

Between the Mutual Film and the Joseph Burstyn decisions, local, state, and city censorship boards had the power to edit or ban films. City and state censorship ordinances are nearly as old as the movies themselves, and such ordinances banning the public exhibition of "immoral" films proliferated.

Seven states[4] formed film censorship boards, which both pre-dated and outlasted the Hays Code:

Public outcry over perceived immorality in Hollywood and the movies, as well as the growing number of city and state censorship boards, led the movie studios to fear that federal regulations were not far off; so they created, in 1922, the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (which became the Motion Picture Association of America in 1945), an industry trade and lobby organization. The association was headed by Will H. Hays, a well-connected Republican lawyer who had previously been United States Postmaster General; and he derailed attempts to institute federal censorship over the movies.

In 1927, Hays compiled a list of subjects, culled from his experience with the various US censorship boards, which he felt Hollywood studios would be wise to avoid. He called this list "the formula" but it was popularly known as the "don'ts and be carefuls" list. In 1930, Hays created the Studio Relations Committee (SRC) to implement his censorship code, but the SRC lacked any real enforcement capability.

The advent of talking pictures in 1927 led to a perceived need for further enforcement. Martin Quigley, the publisher of a Chicago-based motion picture trade newspaper, began lobbying for a more extensive code that not only listed material that was inappropriate for the movies, but also contained a moral system that the movies could help to promote - specifically a system based on Catholic theology. He recruited Father Daniel Lord, a Jesuit priest and instructor at the Catholic St. Louis University, to write such a code and on March 31, 1930 the board of directors of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association adopted it formally. This original version especially was once popularly known as the Hays Code, but it and its later revisions are now commonly called the Production Code.

However, Depression economics and changing social mores resulted in the studios producing racier fare that the Code, lacking an aggressive enforcement body, was unable to redress. This era is known as Pre-Code Hollywood.

An amendment to the Code, adopted on June 13, 1934, established the Production Code Administration (PCA), and required all films released on or after July 1, 1934 to obtain a certificate of approval before being released. For more than thirty years following, virtually all motion pictures produced in the United States and released by major studios adhered to the code. The Production Code was not created or enforced by federal, state, or city government. In fact, the Hollywood studios adopted the code in large part in the hopes of avoiding government censorship, preferring self-regulation to government regulation.

The enforcement of the Production Code led to the dissolution of many local censorship boards. Meanwhile, the US Customs Department prohibited the importation of the Czech film Ecstasy (1933), starring an actress soon to be known as Hedy Lamarr, an action which was upheld on appeal.

In 1934, Joseph I. Breen (18881965) was appointed head of the new Production Code Administration (PCA). Under Breen's leadership of the PCA, which lasted until his retirement in 1954, enforcement of the Production Code became rigid and notorious. Breen's power to change scripts and scenes angered many writers, directors, and Hollywood moguls. The PCA had two offices, one in Hollywood, and the other in New York City. Films approved by the New York PCA office were issued certificate numbers that began with a zero.

The first major instance of censorship under the Production Code involved the 1934 film Tarzan and His Mate, in which brief nude scenes involving a body double for actress Maureen O'Sullivan were edited out of the master negative of the film. Another famous case of enforcement involved the 1943 western The Outlaw, produced by Howard Hughes. The Outlaw was denied a certificate of approval and kept out of theaters for years because the film's advertising focused particular attention on Jane Russell's breasts. Hughes eventually persuaded Breen that the breasts did not violate the code and the film could be shown.

Some films produced outside the mainstream studio system during this time did flout the conventions of the code, such as Child Bride (1938), which featured a nude scene involving 12-year-old actress Shirley Mills. Even cartoon sex symbol Betty Boop had to change from being a flapper, and began to wear an old-fashioned housewife skirt.

In 1936, Arthur Mayer and Joseph Burstyn attempted to distribute Whirlpool of Desire, a French film originally titled Remous and directed by Edmond T. Greville. The legal battle lasted until November 1939, when the film was released in the U.S.

In 1952, in the case of Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overruled its 1915 decision and held that motion pictures were entitled to First Amendment protection, so that the New York State Board of Regents could not ban "The Miracle", a short film that was one half of L'Amore (1948), an anthology film directed by Roberto Rossellini. Film distributor Joseph Burstyn released the film in the U.S. in 1950, and the case became known as the "Miracle Decision" due to its connection to Rossellini's film. That in turn reduced the threat of government regulation that justified the Production Code, and the PCA's powers over the Hollywood industry were greatly reduced.[9]

At the forefront of challenges to the code was director Otto Preminger, whose films violated the code repeatedly in the 1950s. His 1953 film The Moon is Blue, about a young woman who tries to play two suitors off against each other by claiming that she plans to keep her virginity until marriage, was the first film since the pre-code Hollywood days to use the words "virgin", "seduce" and "mistress", and it was released without a certificate of approval. He later made The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), which portrayed the prohibited subject of drug abuse, and Anatomy of a Murder (1959) which dealt with rape. Preminger's films were direct assaults on the authority of the Production Code and, since they were successful, hastened its abandonment.

In 1954, Joseph Breen retired and Geoffrey Shurlock was appointed as his successor. Variety noted "a decided tendency towards a broader, more casual approach" in the enforcement of the code.

Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot (1959) and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) were also released without a certificate of approval due to their themes and became box office hits, and as a result further weakened the authority of the code.

In the early 1960s, British films such as Victim (1961), A Taste of Honey (1961), and The Leather Boys (1963) offered a daring social commentary about gender roles and homophobia that violated the Hollywood Production Code, yet the films were still released in America. The American women's rights, gay rights, civil rights, and youth movements prompted a reevaluation of the depiction of themes of race, class, gender, and sexuality that had been restricted by the Code. In addition, the growing popularity of international films with more explicit content helped to discredit the Code.

In 1964 The Pawnbroker, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Rod Steiger, was initially rejected because of two scenes in which the actresses Linda Geiser and Thelma Oliver fully expose their breasts; and a sex scene between Oliver and Jaime Snchez, which it described as "unacceptably sex suggestive and lustful." Despite the rejection, the film's producers arranged for Allied Artists to release the film without the Production Code seal and the New York censors licensed The Pawnbroker without the cuts demanded by Code administrators. The producers also appealed the rejection to the Motion Picture Association of America.[10]

On a 6-3 vote, the MPAA granted the film an "exception" conditional on "reduction in the length of the scenes which the Production Code Administration found unapprovable." The exception to the Code was granted as a "special and unique case," and was described by The New York Times as "an unprecedented move that will not, however, set a precedent."[11]The requested reductions of nudity were minimal, and the outcome was viewed in the media as a victory for the film's producers.[10] The Pawnbroker was the first film since pre-code era featuring bare breasts to receive Production Code approval. In his 2008 study of films during that era, Pictures at a Revolution, author Mark Harris wrote that the MPAA's action was "the first of a series of injuries to the Production Code that would prove fatal within three years."[11]

When Jack Valenti became President of the MPAA in 1966, he was immediately faced with a problem regarding language in the film version of Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Valenti negotiated a compromise: The word "screw" was removed, but other language, including the phrase "hump the hostess," remained. The film received Production Code approval despite having language that was clearly prohibited. The British-produced, but American financed film Blowup (1966) presented a different problem. After the film was denied Production Code approval, MGM released it anyway, the first instance of an MPAA member company distributing a film that did not have an approval certificate. The MPAA could do little about it.

Enforcement had become impossible, and the Production Code was abandoned.

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Film censorship in the United States - Wikipedia

BEIJING (AP) A huge fan of rock legends Queen, Peng Yanzi rushed to see Bohemian Rhapsody, the biopic about the bands late lead singer, Freddie Mercury, while he was traveling in Britain last October.

It was a touching film that made him cry hard, Peng says. He loved it enough to watch it a second time in his home city of Guangzhou after the film garnered a surprise China release.

But the version of Bohemian Rhapsody he saw this past weekend was notably different from the original. Moviegoers in China say key scenes about Mercurys sexuality have been either abruptly muted or cut altogether.

The cut scenes really affect the movie, said Peng, a Chinese LGBT rights activist. The film talks about how (Mercury) became himself, and his sexuality is an important part of becoming who he was.

Scenes that were deleted include one in which Mercury reveals to his long-time partner that he is not heterosexual. In the part of the film where Mercury tells the band that he has AIDS, the dialogue goes silent.

Its a pity the scenes were removed, said Hua Zile, chief editor of VCLGBT, an LGBT-themed account with more than a million followers on Weibo, one of Chinas top social media platforms.

This kind of deletion weakens his gay identity. Its a bit disrespectful to his real experience and makes the character superficial, Hua said. There is no growth and innermost being of him. Hua said he also watched both versions of the movie, in the semi-autonomous region of Hong Kong, which enjoys greater freedoms from censorship than mainland China, and the Chinese city of Guangzhou.

The missing scenes confused some moviegoers. Su Lei read Mercurys biography online before watching the movie Wednesday afternoon so that she could better understand the plot and character development.

Now its a very open era, influenced by some American and British TV dramas. People now can understand and accept this, said Su, who works for an accounting firm. She called the film inspiring and said cutting the gay content was unnecessary.

Lu, a freelancer in Shanghai who asked to be identified only by his family name, watched the original version online after seeing the movie in a Chinese theater, where he said he found parts of the dialogue incoherent.

Lu said that despite some lines being erased, it was still obvious the main character is gay. But the movie has been deleted like this, which affects its entirety, he said.

While LGBT content is generally less taboo than other topics that Chinese authorities deem sensitive, same-sex relationships are still virtually absent from mainstream media.

In 2017, a government-affiliated internet TV association warned streaming content providers against depicting homosexuality, labeling it an abnormal sexual behavior. A similar move last year from Weibo provoked an outcry that prompted the website to backtrack and state that a cleanup of games and cartoons will no longer target gay content.

When Chinese video site Mango TV livestreamed the Academy Awards in February, Bohemian Rhapsody lead actor Rami Maleks speech was subtitled to read special group when in fact he said gay man.

Mango TV also censored two LGBT-themed performances during last years Eurovision song contest, causing Eurovision to terminate its partnership with the Chinese broadcaster in the middle of the competition season.

___

This version corrects that Mercury in a scene that was deleted made the revelation to long-term partner, not wife.

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Chinese viewers balk at 'Bohemian Rhapsody' film censorship

Please do not use the censored /r/bitcoin or Bitcointalk. Use /r/btc instead.

Anyone who has been following Bitcoin closely over the past couple of years should by now be well aware of the issues being debated and the existence of censorship in some of Bitcoins most prominent communities. For the unaware, a primer:

The Bitcoin network is currently at max load, and today is capable of processing approximately three transactions per second. This was not part of the original design of the Bitcoin protocol, and the 1MB block size limit was added in 2010 by Satoshi Nakamoto himself as a temporary anti-spam measure.

Because bitcoins were so cheap at the time, and the number of bitcoin users so few, making transactions on the bitcoin network was effectively free. The concern was that a malicious entity could simply flood the network with transactions, filling up blocks and bogging down transaction speeds for legitimate users. Because transactions were so cheap to make, such an attack would have cost the perpetrator very little to pull off, and could have crippled the entire bitcoin network while it was still in its infancy. Former bitcoin lead maintainer Gavin Andresen addressed this attack in a blog post, writing:

But even this one megabyte limit was hardly restrictive; at the time the average block size ranged from 200 bytes to occasional peaks of around one kilobyte. The one megabyte limit was meant to handle new user influx and peak period transactions up to several thousand times what the average daily transaction volume was at the time. In October 2010, Satoshi Nakamoto even laid out his plan for increasing the maximum block size:

Pretty simple, right?

One would think. Since the limit was introduced in 2010, there have been countless discussions on the necessity as well as the methods that would be used to increase this limit, and Bitcoins transaction processing capabilities with it. Those attempts have repeatedly been blocked by a small group of developers, and in recent years discussion of increasing the limit has been censored from some of Bitcoins largest discussion forums, all of which are moderated by the same individual, who posts using the handle Theymos. What is forbidden includes any discussion of code changes that propose increasing the limitation.

Some dont believe the censorship is problematic, or refuse to acknowledge that it is censorship at all. Heres Blockstream CEO Adam Back:

And Blockstream CTO and Bitcoin Core developer, Gregory Maxwell:

And Blockstream contractor and Bitcoin Core developer Luke-jr:

And Bitcoin Core developer Peter Todd:

And /r/bitcoin moderator /u/frankenmint:

Based on this outpouring of support from certain interested parties, its almost as if theyd have you believe there were no censorship happening at all! Pay no attention to the fact that /u/theymos has been shown to have financial dealings with Blockstream. Lets take a look at censorship on /r/bitcoin through the ages:

May 7th, 2015. Using a tool called UnReddit, we can see a large number of deleted comments in a thread on increasing the block size.

August 9th, 2015. A highly upvoted thread (archive)(705 points, 89% upvoted) on /r/bitcoin receives three Reddit gildings for asking:

/r/bitcoin moderator /u/BashCo posts a response and is heavily downvoted when he says:

Again for the uninitiated: the moderators of /r/bitcoin attempt to classify discussion of Bitcoin code changes (only the ones that attempt to increase the limit) as off-topic on the basis of being altcoins. Altcoins are entirely different currencies, with their own ledgers and tokens, and are not inter-operable with Bitcoin. BitcoinXT, on the other hand, runs on the same Bitcoin network as other Bitcoin software, uses the same tokens, and the same ledger, and is interoperable. A user running the BitcoinXT software is perfectly capable of transacting bitcoins with a user running the Bitcoin Core software.

August 13th, 2015. /u/aminok has his post (archive) deleted, in which he asked the mods: please dont try to impose your will on the Bitcoin community. He posted about it in an uncensored Bitcoin subreddit.

August 14th, 2015. The very next day /u/aminok was then banned for posting a thread asking How is the Bitcoin community supposed to build consensus to do a hard fork when the /r/bitcoin mods ban any discussion of a hard fork proposal that does not have consensus? (archive). The thread was deleted after reaching the #1 spot on /r/bitcoin.

Aminok posted about the banning in an uncensored subreddit. /r/bitcoin moderator /u/StarMaged chimed in to offer this reasoning:

August 15th, 2015. A now [deleted] post (archive) on /r/bitcoin calling for the moderators to step down garnered more than 2,800 upvotes (91% upvoted), making it one of the highest-voted threads of /r/bitcoin history. The community demonstrated consensus (heh) that the current /r/bitcoin mod squad was corrupt, participating in censorship, and needed to go.

Ironically, in the same thread, /r/bitcoin moderator /u/BashCo says that he supports consensus, before admitting that he is regrettably censoring posts.

August 16th, 2015. Moderator /u/BashCo admits that the mods are participating in censorship:

The same day, user /u/SatoshisGhost was banned for mentioning BitcoinXT.

A popular Bitcoin webcomic artist /u/raisethelimit was given a 30 day ban for trolling when he tried posting two of his comics there.

/u/Jackten was given a 7-day ban for attempting to discuss Bitcoin-XT. In the comments, user /u/dnivi3 posts about how none of his posts are getting through either, and then edits his post to say that he has been banned from /r/bitcoin (presumably for his comment in /r/bitcoin_uncensored).

The same day, during this massive purge of users, /r/bitcoin head moderator /u/Theymos posted a thread titled, Call for more moderators (archive). The thread was heavily downvoted, and sits at 0 points (43% upvoted). His post includes the phrase: Dont apply if you disagree with /r/Bitcoin policy.

August 18th, 2015. /u/SundoshiNakatoto has his post (archive) deleted for encouraging others to educate themselves on which code they like best (Core or XT) and running a full node. The deletion was discussed in an uncensored subreddit.

August 19th, 2015. /r/bitcoin moderator /u/jratcliff63367 makes a post to Lets Talk Bitcoin titled Confessions of an /r/bitcoin moderator. He observes:

August 24th, 2015. /u/chinawat is banned for noticing and pointing out all the recent bans.

August 25th, 2015. /u/SwagPokerz explains how the /r/bitcoin moderators have manipulated the subreddits CSS to mask the presence of deleted comments.

With /r/bitcoins custom CSS (70,000 lines!), deleted comments are masked, and the new comment tree will display like this:

Worth noting here is that Reddits moddiquette guidelines tell moderators not to Hide reddit ads or purposely mislead users with custom CSS.

August 29th, 2015. Ten days after his anti-censorship post on Lets Talk Bitcoin, former /r/bitcoin moderator /u/jratcliff63367 announces that he has been removed from his role. In the thread, /u/theymos chimes in to explain why he removed jratcliff:

September 4th, 2015. /u/hardleft121 announces that he has been removed as a moderator of /r/bitcoin for inactivity (archive). /u/hardleft121 is a bit of a legend in the Bitcoin subreddits for his frequent generous tipping of bitcoin users, sometimes even giving away hundreds of dollars at a time.

The same day, he makes a post to /r/bitcoin (archive) that garners 403 points and the sympathy and outrage of /r/bitcoin users. In the thread, it is revealed that /u/SeansOutpost was not removed as moderator, despite also being quite inactive as a mod. When asked what he thinks of the censorship, /u/SeansOutpost wrote:

He was shortly thereafter removed as a moderator.

November 4th, 2015. /u/Theymos attempts to explain his censorship policies, writing:

This once again raises the question: how is something supposed to gain community consensus if it is not allowed to be discussed? Theymos also has a strong tendency to play word games. It is very unclear and never explicitly defined what the difference of promoting as an idea and promoting the usage of is. The main factor seems to be whether it is discussed favorably (not permitted) or unfavorably (permitted).

November 5th, 2015. In a post that was downvoted to -749 points (archive), /u/theymos threatens to ban prominent Bitcoin company Coinbase and its CEO Brian Armstrong from /r/bitcoin for supporting block size increase proposal BIP101. Theymos also threatened to remove Coinbase from bitcoin.org (which he controls).

In the same thread, /u/StarMaged chimes in and admits how the post being discussed had been deleted by /r/bitcoin mods several times prior to being allowed. StarMaged also says of users commenting on the censorship and the ensuing confusion that

Yes, ideas are dangerous.

December 26th, 2015. /u/nathan2055 tested /r/bitcoin moderation policies by posting a totally innocuous discussion thread (archive) asking What is you guys [sic] opinion on BitcoinXT and BIP101? Of course, the post was immediately removed from /r/bitcoin. Moderator /u/StarMaged had to venture into /r/Bitcoin_Uncensored to provide his rationale for deleting the post:

/u/Nathan2055 also posted a screenshot of a private message exchange he had with /r/bitcoin moderator /u/110101002, in which the moderator explains that discussion of Coinbase is now completely forbidden in /r/bitcoin for being off-topic, simply because they run a different backend that is not Bitcoin Core.

In the same thread, StarMaged goes on to explain:

December 27th, 2015. Theymos made good on his earlier threats (archive) to remove Coinbase from bitcoin.org, along with any other company that dared to voice an opinion in favor of bigger blocks (as seen in this Github commit).

The post calling this behavior out had 419 points (87% upvoted), and the normally polite Erik Voorhees went so far as to say:

December 28th, 2015. A rogue /r/bitcoin mod going by the username /u/CensorshipIsTheWorst leaked the following conversation from the /r/Bitcoin mod-mail:

A few hours later, /u/colsatre had his moderator position revoked, leading some to speculate that he was the rogue mod. /u/CensorshipIsTheWorst never posted again.

January 9th, 2016. A Github pull request to revert the removal of Coinbase and others is ignored, despite overwhelming consensus from Github users that the pull request should be merged (only three users NACKed the request). The post discussing this matter (archive)had 926 upvotes (89% upvoted).

Of course the top comment, with a score of -53, from rabid censorship supporter and JoinMarket developer /u/belcher_ insists that the vote is invalid because the pull request was brigaded. Youll notice a similar refrain from the mods of /r/Bitcoin whenever they delete a post that disagrees with their status quo: The post was upvoted, ergo it was brigaded, ergo we had to remove it.

It is interesting to note that a post with a score of negative 53 points would appear at the top of the comments thread. In addition to hiding the scores of new posts for 8-12 hours to obscure voting activity, the moderators of /r/bitcoin will set the default comment sorting behavior in threads they disagree with to controversial, so that the most heavily downvoted comments appear at the top of the thread, deceiving users unfamiliar with the practice into thinking that the most unpopular opinions are in fact the most popular.

March 8th, 2016. Long-time bitcoin user and inventor of the mining pool /u/slush0 remarks that the /r/bitcoin moderators censored a video he made explaining how users of his mining pool can vote on which software to run.

Although a self-described crypto-anarchist, Slush seems to have developed quite the case of Stockholm syndrome. Today he can be found actively participating in discussions on /r/Bitcoin and calling for the destruction of bitcoins security model.

The same day, /u/BeYourOwnBank points out that /r/bitcoin moderators have been deleting posts of Satoshi Nakamoto quotes. (Example 1, Example 2)

March 9th, 2016. /u/alwayswatchyoursix posts an accusation that mods of /r/bitcoin are actively searching /r/btc for users to ban. Former /r/bitcoin moderator /u/MineForeman chimes in to confirm that this is exactly what he has been doing, and admits that it is an automated process.

/u/MineForeman goes on to explain the methodology that his banning bot uses.

March 27th, 2016. /u/blockologist makes two posts to /r/bitcoin. One is titled PollClassic or Core, (Classic was another attempt at a block size increase, after BitcoinXT was killed through a prolific DDoS attack) and the other is a blog post from Gavin Andresen titled Collaboration requires communication. Both were deleted. A moderator of /r/bitcoin provided this rationale:

May 18th, 2016. /u/Annapurna317 receives a 15-day ban from /r/bitcoin for posting the following comment:

July 24th, 2016. Three-year old reddit account and longtime /r/bitcoin poster /u/chinawat demonstrates that his responses to a 1-day old account on /r/bitcoin are being selectively hidden.

August 29th, 2016. One can use a tool called ceddit to see which comments in a thread have been deleted. Here is one example from this day:

October 23rd, 2016. /u/andromedavirus provides proof that one of his comments was censored from /r/bitcoin. What had originally been censored was news of a Bitcoin miner conference held in China, which saw over 300 attendees who were overwhelmingly in favor of a blocksize increase. News of the conference was censored from /r/bitcoin, until a day later a dismissive and inaccurate tweet from prolific troll Samson Mow was permitted to remain:

The next day, /u/andromedavirus was banned from /r/bitcoin (archive) for being a lying troll.

October 31st, 2016. /u/BeijingBitcoins posted (archive) my own article, There Will Be No Bitcoin Split, to /r/bitcoin. It briefly attained the top post position in the subreddit before one of the mods locked the comments.

After realizing what happened while attempting to respond to a comment, /u/BeijingBitcoins then created a post on the uncensored /r/btc about how the comments had been locked. That post quickly gained attention, and within one hour of the /r/btc post drawing attention to the censorship, the original thread at /r/bitcoin had been removed altogether.

The next day, /r/bitcoin moderator /u/Frankenmint made a post in /r/btc to announce that he was the one who had locked the comments and then deleted the post. He explained that he had to lock the comments to prevent it from devolving (into what, exactly?). I had a brief exchange with him, in which I asked:

His response right here sums up the entire position of the /r/bitcoin moderation team. While Bitcoin was originally invented as a crypto-anarchist plaything, and gained early attention from hardcore libertarians, it has now become overrun with paternalistic autocrats such as /u/theymos, /u/BashCo, and /u/frankenmint. These gentlemen rule with an iron fist, deleting posts that they deem to be dangerous to the community, and believing that both the online social community and Bitcoin itself are incapable of self-regulation. Instead they believe that only through the paternalistic wisdom of their own minds will Bitcoin ever amount to anything.

While today the exasperated members of the Bitcoin community accept the heavy-handed censorship as a fact of life, it was not always like this. The examples collected here are but few, and were collected over the course of two hours of research. While today the censorship is accepted as the norm, you can see in some of the examples above that it was once an incredibly contentious issue among the community.

Sadly, many members of the Bitcoin community, including those who have at times described themselves as cypherpunks, libertarians, and crypto-anarchists, have all become complacent with the status quo. Not only do they not attempt to fight against this tyranny, but they casually accept it, defend it, and continue participating in heavily censored forums where the voices of a significant number of their entire community are prevented from ever being heard. What is happening is gas-lighting of the highest order.

John Blocke implores these people to take action: Denounce censorship, and do not participate in censored forums. The Reddit admins have shown time and again that they do not care to disrupt the disruption of a $10 billion open source software movement, so we must take matters into our own hands. Do not let Bitcoin perish at the hands of a petty tyrant like Theymos.

Addendum: this article was disappeared from /r/bitcoin within minutes of it being posted there by /u/BitcoinGuerrilla.

Read this article:
A (brief and incomplete) history of censorship in /r/Bitcoin