Lavinia requires its underlying payment system to satisfy four properties for suitability in censorship-resistant contexts: (1) coercion-resistance through geo-political distribution or anonymization, (2) redeemable with a distributable secret, (3) time-locked escrow preventing early redemption, and (4) an append-only public log. The paper demonstrates that Bitcoin satisfies all four properties, with Zerocash extensions providing payment anonymization to prevent linking payments to specific documents.
From 2017-bocovich-lavinia — Lavinia: An audit-payment protocol for censorship-resistant storage
· §3.2
· 2017
· Financial Cryptography and Data Security
Implications
Censorship-resistant storage payment systems must use time-locked escrow rather than upfront payment — otherwise servers have no incentive to continue storing documents after initial payment is received.
Integrate payment anonymization (e.g., zero-knowledge proofs over the payment ledger) to prevent censors from identifying which documents are being funded and targeting their publishers or sponsors.