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2026-08-13

Review of censorship-resistant storage solutions

Disclaimer

• Quick Note
• Contains politically sensitive info
• Do not blindly follow this post in high-stakes situations. Do your own research.

Table of contents

• Bitcoin blockchain / Ethereum blockchain / Ethereum blobdata
• Torrent
• IPFS / IPNS
• Filecoin / Arweave / Sia / Celestia
• Eastern European VPS
• Federated social media
• Dead drops or smuggling of disks / tapes

Bitcoin blockchain / Ethereum blockchain / Ethereum blobdata

• Most censorship-resistant storage on Earth
  • Bitcoin blockchain has child porn stored on it. I suspect it would also allow govt classified secrets to be stored on it, and people will not attempt to rollback the chain if this happens. (Worst case, Even if they roll back the chain, this will become a major news item, and your content will get mirrored anyway because Streissand effect.)
  • The same goes for ethereum blockchain, and ethereum blobdata.
• A major downside is discoverability. Even after your files are stored on the chain, it is non-trivial for people to find them.
  • Ethereum partially solves this with Ethereum Name Service (ENS). Just track which blobdata is being published by alice.eth
  • Another option to scan the entire chain for specific file formats (via associated magic numbers and metadata and so on). There are github repos that let you do this.
  • There are EIPs to standardise metadata formats for publishing files to ethereum blobdata. I want them to standardise it. See also: I want a standard spec for publishing multi-part files to ethereum blobdata
  • Ethereum blobdata mirrors beyond 18 days still do not have a lot of peers.
• Another major downside is cost. If you are storing more than a few GB at max, this solution straight up does not work. You can at best publish some demo content and IDs/urls/IPs/magnets etc for where the user must go to find the rest of the content
• A small minor downside here is also that a bunch of ethereum services just don't run well on Tor.
  • Metamask extension is not recommended on Tor browser so you'll have to use geth cli or something, most of the RPCs (but not all) get blocked on Tor, and so on. The tools don't get tested on TAILS or Tor anywhere as much bitcoin or monero tools get tested, so there is less support.

Torrent

• The OG censorship-resistant format
• This is less censorship-resistant than blockchain
  • Your data doesn't get immediately mirrored, you need other people to discover you and mirror your content.
  • Until this happens, your server can be hit by a DDOS attack, law enforcement can physically visit you or your server premises and shut down your server, and so on.
• A major upside is that the UX is quite good and many people know how to use it. Even non-technical users can be told to follow instructions like go rent a seedbox online and seed this specific torrent.
• Discoverability is bad.
  • The Pirate Bay and so on exist, but these servers are even more at the whims of whoever happens to be running the server storing the magnet urls. You are not going to find torrents for child porn and classified information on pirate bay.
  • You basically need to solve for discoverability in some entirely different way, and once your target audience already knows how to connect with you, then you can share a torrent with them.

IPFS / IPNS

• IPFS is better than torrent in some ways and worse in some ways.
• It is better in the sense that it has all the features of torrent, plus more.
  • eth.limo lets you natively pair the mirroring ability of IPFS with the discoverability of Ethereum Name Service. You just need to tell your audience to visit alice.eth and they know what IPFS CID to download or mirror.
  • Yes, your original IPFS pinning server can be DDOSed, law enforcement might still manage to shut down your IPFS pinning server before anyone manages to shut it down.
• It is worse in terms of UX.
  • Most people don't know how to run IPFS clients and pin content. So, you will by default get less people mirroring/seeding your content.
  • Also, if eth.limo DNS gets taken down, then downloading IPFS client will be only way for your users to get access to your content, and only some users will bother.

Filecoin / Arweave / Sia / Celesetia

• Anything with a token attached has a much higher scam probability.
• None of these have become that popular.
• AFAIK only Celestia solves the data availability problem atleast the way Vitalik defines it. (As in 51% honest nodes should guarantee DA not probabilisitically ensure DA.)
• I don't understand all these solutions very well. I will avoid writing a detailed review.

Eastern European VPS

• Many famous services like Anna's Archive, Scihub, Libgen, cockbox VPS and so on basically rely on Eastern European VPS.
  • Servers are typically located in Romania / Moldova / Kazakhstan / Ukraine. Popular services include Alexhost, FlokiNET and so on. (This is not a recommendation for any particular VPS provider. Do your own research.)
• Upside is it is very cheap and very easy (assuming basic technical skills).
  • You can share as many TB of content you want, of any format.
• Upside is you get a full VPS not just file storage.
  • For instance you can run dynamic content (example: games that are censored elsewhere). You can run port scans or distribute exploit/malware POCs. You can update content easily.
• UX is also great, because your end users just need a browser and no specific client (like a torrent client or IPFS node or ethereum full node or similar).
• Mirroring exist but is not ideal.
  • Commoncrawl and Anna's Archive mirror a significant chunk of all the websites in the world. However, it may take upto a month for them to crawl your latest content, and someone can take down your servers by then.
  • Many people also scrape many sites for various reasons.
  • It is ideal to provide a separate mirroring functionality though. For instance Anna's Archive, Scihub and Libgen provide torrents, in addition to their hosted servers.
• Discoverability is not fully solved.
  • Cloudflare DNS is quite censorship-resistant but there have been instances of cloudflare taking away your DNS, or domain registrars seizing domains. So you will need to rotate to new domains, and your users will need a way to find out your new domains.
  • In theory you can use ENS for dicoverability (publish your latest IPs on ethereum via ENS), however I haven't seen this solution be popular yet.

Federated social media

• Examples: Matrix, XMPP, Bluesky, etc
• If any of these ever becomes popular, this is great for discoverability.
  • For instance you can first host your content on the blockchain, and then make it discoverable via Bluesky even if Twitter censors you.
• In practice, running servers for social media is still expensive as fuck so there is centralisation in terms of how many people actually run servers and maintain backups.
• In practice, network effects are real, so whichever servers end up the most popular are also the most vulnerable to various types of political pressure.

Dead drops or smuggling of disks / tapes

• See also: Why I don't usually recommend dead drops
• Camera surveillance has made it difficult to anonymously distribute physical HDDs / SSDs / LTO-9 tapes in most cities of the world.
• During an internet blackout this is the only option however, for instance some North Koreans and Afghanistanis have obtained access to content via smuggling of hard disks.

Hetzner VPS / AWS / Azure / GCP

• This is the basic default solution if you don't care much for censorship-resistance or privacy etc

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