Free speech is a fascinating topic in political philosophy. It is of paramount importance for a functioning society. Nowadays, our society constitutes two important realms: the physical, and the digital. It’s useful to think from first principles when discussing these issues. 

So, what is speech? It’s just the expression of ideas, and ideas can be expressed in two ways: in real-time, and in written form*. Real-time speech being the action of your mouth creating certain sound waves, and written ‘speech’ being any kind of information represented by visible things. Interestingly, only the latter exists in the digital world. Everything in the digital world is ultimately represented in binary form, 1s and 0s. All digital manifestations of information are just text. Nothing more. 

Securing real-time, public free speech in the physical world is relatively simple, as it only really constitutes two stages: thinking and verbally transmitting. Thoughts are extremely difficult to regulate, so enabling someone to think freely is an easy and important part of securing free speech. To facilitate the free transfer of ideas, you need to permit people to speak what they want. Or, in extreme-first-principles thinking, permit them to create an infinite range of sound waves. In London, Speakers’ corner is the epitome of securing real-time, public free speech in the physical world. Anyone can think and say anything. 

Written, public speech is slightly more complicated. It involves thinking of the idea, transferring it, and storing it. In the physical world, you have two options when it comes to transferring written information: distribute many copies of your written speech, or gather people to one physical place to learn about it.  Transferring written information in a free, decentralised and public way is very difficult in the physical world. To pursue the former option of transfer (distribution), you are at the whim of the printing press or, before them, the literate person of the community. To pursue the latter (gathering), you’re also at the whim of whoever has access to display such information publicly (maybe whoever owns the billboard) . Your ability to transfer written speech freely in the physical world is limited, due to the difficulty of everyone being able to spread information equally. Once information is spread, however, it’s fairly easy to store it in a public and decentralised way. You write down your idea and distribute it. No one person "stores" the bible – it’s stored in a distributed, decentralised way, and that’s why it’s survived 4000 years. No one can delete the bible. In short: you can’t transfer written information in a decentralised way in the physical world, but you can store it as such. 

The internet completely changed this. In the digital world, you don’t need to ask for anyone’s permission to transfer your idea via the internet – there is no printing press, literate minority, etc. Everyone is a publisher, at least since the internet’s second iteration (a.k.a. Web2). But this came with a trade-off: information was no longer stored in a decentralised way. So, the digital world swapped realms of the strength of written free speech in the physical world: 

You could not  store information in a decentralised way in the digital world, so free speech was limited**. Until January 3rd, 2009. On that day, things completely changed. Bitcoin was implemented and, for the first time, humans could process, transfer, and store written ideas in an open, public, censorship resistant, decentralised manner. Free speech had been achieved in the digital world. As Nakamoto put it: information became “easy to spread but hard to stifle”. 

BBS uses the same technology to bring the free speech of linguistically-expressed ideas, posts, into the digital world. And that is why it is censorship-resistant. No one controls what you use to create your writing (your PC). No one controls what you use to transfer your writing (the internet). No one controls where your writing is stored (the blockchain). For the first time. Ever. 

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Sorry for taking so long to get to the point. I hope some of the information was informative. 

*I use “written” as a broad term to mean anything visual. It could include art, etc. 

**because speech necessitates storage in the digital world