What Ledgers Should Earn Our Trust
There are many attributes of a blockchain ledger like the Bitcoin ledger. It is permissionless. It is immutable. It is censorship resistant. It is the only ledger that is trusted and does not require third-party validation. Validation is embedded in the protocol. Further, everything is recorded with a time stamp. It is a trusted, timeline of truth
I wish I could say the same thing about the Washington Post and mainstream media. Upon reading this article: https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/06/washington-post-retroactively-edits-15-month-old-piece-that-bashed-tom-cotton-on-wuhan-lab-leak-theory/
Numerous questions and doubts come to mind. My best guess is what happened is that WaPo, being anti-Trump, actively pursued a narrative to discredit any Trump claim they could create a credible narrative to discredit him. A word the WaPo liked to use was “debunked”. Debunked by who? “EXPERTS”. And, it seemed that WaPo embraced the Fauci Infallibility Axiom.
Unfortunately because there is no open source ledger as to how the WaPo established a consensus around a narrative they seemed absolutely certain about, we will never know the truth. Information asymmetry. Something that does not occur on the bitcoin ledger. I doubt WaPo will provide a full, detailed and thorough discovery process so the public can makes its own judgment as to whether they were neutral observers seeking truth and reporting everything to the best of their knowledge including all information that might create doubt to their narrative.
What has been DEBUNKED is the certainty to their claim that there was no way the virus was man-made and came from a lab. And, certainly, that anyone who claims it was even possible that it was made from a lab, man-made and possibly from Wuhan was a conspiracy theorist circulating misinformation and need to be called out. That seems to be the WaPo narrative.
DO NOT DARE QUESTION THE WAPO NARRATIVE!! You are likely to be publicly shamed, doxxed, deplatformed, demonetized, disparaged, demonized and dehumanized.
The role of the press, as the so-called Fourth Estate, was not to collaborate with government bureaucrats and use its power to squash dissent but to be the people’s voice by challenging the government and holding the government accountable.
I want to see the evidence that the WaPo received that led to its certainty that any questioning of a narrative that the virus was a product of nature was thoroughly debunked. What should be the remedy to those who were defamed as a consequence? What should be the punishment for stating an opinion but asserting it as a fact? Should they be barred from using the term EXPERT? Should they be banned as a credible source in the future? Will WaPo lead this introspection as an opportunity to learn?
I personally believe it dishonest to alter a ledger. That is a reason I prefer a decentralized ecosystem, a decentralized ledger where there is no controlling authority, an immutable ledger, everything time-stamped and where the consensus method is trusted and requires no further verification or audit. Liars like to rewrite history. Liars like to control the ledger. So they can alter the past. Erase all inconvenient truths. And, with time, there is no evidence of their transgression; as if they never happened.
People should judge for themselves. Read the article as originally written. Read the recently revised story. And decide for yourself what you expect from those who claim the profession of a journalist and guardians of the truth only seeking truth from a neutral point of view. We can all reach our own conclusions.
I trust what I can verify and validate, everything else to me is noise. Mainstream media offers us human-edited noise. So-called social media offers us algorithmically-generated noise and surveilling all its users, its lab rats, so they can be manipulated and targeted for advertising. Performing experiments on the human rats so they can learn enough about them to exercise influence and control.
It is sad that a society once bound by trust and social capital is now bound by force. Cancellation is preferred to conversation.
Whomever controls the ledger controls the truth. That is why it is imperative that we adopt public, distributed and decentralized ledgers.