Censorship resistance

Another property of smart contracts is censorship resistance. This means that smart contracts, unlike web applications, are much harder to censor. Your web application is hosted on the cloud, but your account can be shut down on a whim. A web application also can be taken down either by requests from third parties or by the admin of the program.

But the programs on the blockchain “live” forever. So long as the Ethereum mainnet is up, people can interact with the programs. As an analogy, it’s like your web application lives forever until the internet as a whole is shut down.

This means that you can create a program where even you cannot censor any users who interact with your program on the blockchain. You can write a program such that no superuser can block or manipulate the balances of something in the smart contract. It becomes harder to censor your smart contract if there is no superuser.

Note

To censor web applications, you...