The Practice of Blocking

The Practice

A generation ago, the internet gave ordinary people the ability to publish.

Before that, publishing was controlled by newspapers, book publishers, and television networks. If you wanted an audience, you needed a gatekeeper. The rise of blogs changed that. With simple tools — first Blogger, then WordPress — anyone could create a website and begin writing. Millions of people began publishing for the first time. Personal journals. Hobbies. Technical knowledge. Research. Commentary. Lived experience. All of it suddenly visible to readers across the globe, without permission, without a publisher, without a printing press.

And some of those bloggers did more than publish. They earned a living from it — through advertising, sponsorships, affiliate deals, products of their own. Publishing without earning is a hobby; publishing with the possibility of earning is a profession. For a meaningful number of people, blogging became a profession.

But blogging also had a weakness. The blogs lived on individual websites. Those websites needed hosting, maintenance, and fees paid year after year. Over time, many of them stopped being paid for. Hosting expired. Platforms shut down. Domains lapsed. Years of writing and thought — sometimes a decade or more of someone's life — simply vanished. A large portion of the early internet has quietly been lost this way.

What is Blocking

Today we can do better. The technology that makes the better version possible is the BSV blockchain — a public, permanent, distributed ledger that can store data, not just money, at very low cost in very large amounts. If you write something onto BSV, it is timestamped. It is preserved. It exists across thousands of independent computers around the world. No company owns it. No platform can remove it. No expired domain can lose it. And it costs you a fraction of a cent to put it there.

I have started to call the practice of publishing on the blockchain blocking — by analogy with the practice of publishing on the early internet, which came to be called blogging. To block something is to publish it on the blockchain.

Just as people began blogging when the internet made publishing easy, people can now begin blocking on the blockchain. Articles, journals, research notes, archives, creative works, historical records — any of it can be blocked.

What Blocks Have That Blogs Never Had

When I publish a blog post on a website, two things are true that we have all stopped noticing because we have lived with them so long. The first is that I cannot easily be paid directly. The second is that the people who appreciate my work are scattered across platforms that cannot talk to each other.

Blocking changes both.

Take payment first. Bloggers who earned a living did so by routing payment through advertising networks, sponsorships, affiliate links, or by selling products on a separate platform. Every dollar passed through somebody else's pipe. The reader who valued the writing could not simply pay the writer.

Because the BSV blockchain is, at its heart, a payment network — peer-to-peer electronic cash, as Bitcoin's inventor described it — every block I publish can carry a payment address. Anyone in the world who values the work can send a tip directly to me. No advertising platform between us. No publisher taking a cut. No payment processor charging a percentage. The fees on the network are fractions of a cent, so even the smallest tips reach me.

Now the second thing — the engagement problem. When you appreciate something on today's internet, you click a like. A thumbs-up. A heart. But that like is locked to the platform you are on. A YouTube like only counts on YouTube. A Twitter like only counts on Twitter. The creator may exist across all those platforms, and may have audience on each, but the appreciation cannot travel between them.

A tip can travel. If you tip a creator in BSV, it does not matter which platform you are on. It does not matter which platform they are on. You scan their address, or paste it into your wallet, and the value reaches them — directly, immediately, anywhere in the world.

That has a second-order consequence. A tip is harder to fake than a like. A like costs nothing — anyone can give a million of them. A tip, even a small one, is real signal, because somebody paid for it. Tips, in time, may turn out to be a more honest measure of engagement than any of the like-buttons we have been counting for the last twenty years.

The Invitation

Earth Log is one project. The practice of blocking is available to anyone.

If you write, photograph, document, paint, compose, code, research, or simply have something you want preserved beyond your own lifetime, the same approach is available to you. Inscribe your work on the BSV blockchain. Put a tipping address on it. Host the work wherever it is best seen. Let the readers who value it pay you directly.

It does not have to be a long-running project. It can be a single document. A single image. A single piece of music. A short film. A photograph from a moment that mattered. Whatever it is, if you would like it to outlive your hosting bill — and to be paid for, directly, as long as it has readers — blocking is now a real option.

And once people begin to use it for creative work, they will start using it for other things too. Contracts. Ownership records. Certificates of authenticity. Anything where a permanent timestamp and an honest public record matter.

A generation ago, the internet gave ordinary people the ability to publish. A generation later, BSV gives them the ability to publish permanently, and to be paid for it directly, on the same rails, anywhere in the world.

 

Marquez Comelab
March 2026