Type-I and II censorship resistance

We can distinguish between two types of censorship resistance:

  • Type-I or filter resistance prevents discrimination between different users or different data use cases within the same protocol, by the infrastructure that operates the protocol (e.g. Ethereum RPC nodes)

  • Type-II or ban resistance prevents the protocol itself from being banned by powerful adversaries that control underlying infrastructure (e.g. ISPs, nation states)

Many crypto* projects have pretty strong Type-I censorship resistance, such as Tor, privacy coins, etc.

Some communication projects (like Tor pluggable transport) try to achieve Type-II censorship resistance at the cost of massive centralization that makes Type-I censorship resistance much harder.

Few projects try to achieve both; Earendil is an exception.

See more here.

Last updated