Took this one by accident while playing with different shutter speeds at night.

Camera: Fujifilm X-Pro2
Lens: Fujinon XF 56mm f/1.2 R

The Blockchain Report:

The Substratum platform utilizes blockchain technology by having cryptographic algorithms that ensure data integrity. This leads to a more secure and private Internet experience.

So many people fail to realize Substratum’s network routing layer has nothing to do with blockchain technology. Substratum only uses blockchain technology, specifically the ERC-20 token standard, to process payouts for network contributors. Seriously, just take a few seconds to think about this. Why would Substratum route network data packets through blockchain (a slow public database) to “ensure data integrity”? How would that even be possible?

So you may be wondering what the benefit of this is. Well as we’ve seen from centralized hosting platforms, censorship has become a large-scale issue. This is the kind of thing that overcomes that. A real world example would be Chinese citizens using Substratum nodes in order to access websites that the government restricts them from being able to see.

I’m 100% against oppressive censorship, but let’s stop pretending that Substratum is somehow going to make a difference. In fact, I’d argue that Substratum actually puts more Chinese citizens at risk. China has a history of imprisoning VPN providers. Starting a VPN service requires a significant amount of capital to build out the proper infrastructure. Thus, the opportunity to start up such an enterprise is only available to a small minority of people.

Substratum essentially enables anyone with a computer and Internet connection to become a VPN-equivalent service provider by serving requests on the network. This is a problem because there’s nothing stopping the Chinese government from setting up a few Substratum nodes to do IP discovery on the network. What do you think they’re going to do once they start finding Chinese IP addresses? Sit around and earn SUB tokens?