The source codes of the «Monument» contract, created around 2:30 UTC on Friday, wrote down the biography of Dr. Li in Chinese with a highlighted «R.I.P» and his contribution as a medical expert to alerting others of the danger of the virus as early as Dec. 30 – only to be reprimanded by local police later on.
Someone has just created a smart contract on ethereum with source codes in the shape of a monument in memorial of Dr. Li Wenliang, the whistleblower of China’s coronavirus outbreak, who died of the disease.
The creation of the smart contract, which now becomes immutable and can’t be censored on a blockchain, comes at a time when Chinese netizens are showing widespread sadness and furor on messaging application WeChat and social media Weibo.
The news of his death broke late night Thursday China time, which immediately jumped to the top spot of Weibo’s real-time trending topic list.
Within minutes, it was dropped to the 7th position and now it is no longer on the list even though the hashtag #Dr. Li Wenliang passed away# has so far got 1 billion views with over 1 million discussions on the social media.
Meanwhile, another hashtag – #Wuhan government owes an apology to Dr. Li# in Chinese – has been restricted. Searching for this hashtag on Weibo now leads to no results, although it was accessible on Thursday night immediately following Li’s death.
Li, a doctor at a hospital in Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, was one of the eight people who sent out early warnings on WeChat to fellow medics about the seriousness of the disease before the local authority informed the public that the disease is contagious.
He was immediately silenced and reprimanded by local police for sending ”false information.“ But Li contracted the virus while treating patient at Wuhan Central Hospital and died of the disease after efforts to treat him failed.
China’s Great Firewall Blocks Popular ETH Block Browser Etherscan
China’s Great Firewall, a tool used to ban Chinese citizens from using sites like Google and Facebook, has listed a major explorer for Ethereum’s (ETH) blockchain.
According to data from non-profit monitoring organization GreatFire, China allegedly blocked one of the most popular ETH block browsers, Etherscan, in October 2019. As of Dec. 3, Etherscan’s domain remained inaccessible from IP addresses inside mainland China, as reported by crypto publication Coindesk on Dec. 3.
Etherscan is aware of the block, firm’s CEO says
While the Etherscan’s blockage was largely unnoticed, the firm’s CEO Matthew Tan reportedly said that Etherscan noticed the action “within the last 3 months”, Coindesk reports. Cointelegraph contacted Etherscan’s team to confirm the information but the firm hadn’t responded as of publication.
The block’s timeline
According to GreatFire, which collects a database of websites blocked by the Great Firewall, Etherscan was purportedly still intact with «no censorship detected» as of Aug. 17, 2019.
The Ethereum block browser was fully blocked by Oct. 29, 2019, while the exact time of the block is not reported by GreatFire.
Other ETH blockchain explorers still accessible in China
Meanwhile, other Ethereum block explorers are still intact in China. As reported by Coindesk, a localized version of the browser, cn.etherscan.com, is accessible to Chinese users as of press time.
A block explorer is a website or a tool that allows users to track blocks, wallet addresses, network hashrate, transaction data and other key data on a certain blockchain, like the Bitcoin blockchain, the Litecoin (LTC) blockchain, or the Ethereum blockchain. For Bitcoin, there are a number of block explorers, including Blockchain.com, Blockexplorer.com, or Btc.com.
Meanwhile, Etherscan is just one of a number of block explorers such as Etherchain.org and Ethplorer.io. In March 2019, major Ethereum wallet supplier MyEtherWallet announced the launch of the alpha version of its new open-source Ethereum blockchain explorer, EthVM.
