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An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]

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Re: An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]

#31

Post by elmar »

jwilk wrote: post #5

Abstract: Blockchains primarily enable credible accounting of digital events, e.g., money transfers in cryptocurrencies. However, beyond this original purpose, blockchains also irrevocably record arbitrary data, ranging from short messages to pictures. This does not come without risk for users as each participant has to locally replicate the complete blockchain, particularly including potentially harmful content. We…

"illegal pornography, can render the mere possession of a blockchain illegal."

I see this as a very strong legal attack vector on full nodes and cryptocurrencies, probably a way around it, is to only allow meta information on a cryptographic form, even then the owner can publish the view key publicly.

A drastic solution is to just prune or don't even allow metadata.

Re: An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]

#32

Post by lolc »

userbinator wrote: post #26
Tomte wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no need to legalize child porn just because you think it's necessary for "computers".

Digital depictions of illegal acts in real life should remain legal, and illegal acts in real life should also remain illegal. I think that's the best way to resolve this.

What if one's classmates trade photographs of one getting raped? Maybe you would accept this based on your principles. But do you also demand that everybody else accepts this?

Maybe the act in itself wasn't even illegal. But publication may still be. I can have your consent to record, but not to publish. Should we just accept that the publication was illegal, but once-breached, further publication is legal?

So if I want to air something, I publish it anonymously and can then freely refer to it? A lot of laws would have to be rewritten for this to work. Privacy laws and copyright laws among them.

Re: An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]

#33

Post by rogual »

Isn't intent generally a big deal in law? If I argued that your innocent MS Word doc was illegal because it decoded to child abuse images under a special encoding scheme I just made up, I'd be laughed out of court, and rightly so. It's technically true, but irrelevant. No crime was committed. Doesn't the same principle apply here?

Re: An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]

#34

Post by amelius »

zeth___ wrote: post #12
Moodles wrote: post #6

Some interesting graffiti on the bitcoin blockchain: http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photo... I have always wondered this. What will a country do if someone embeds child pornography or a picture of Mohammed or something in the blockchain? Will it then be illegal to store the blockchain in that country? Is a link to such an image much different to an actual image? It seems hard to ever stop this…

I haven't looked for obvious reasons but back in the day people were saying that there was already child porn embedded in bitcoin: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=671894.0 Which is why child porn is one of the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money launderers. That we are trying to apply flesh space laws to bits just goes to show how stupid we still are: https://en.w…

Note that we only need one number to capture all possible finite content (i.e., the number is chosen such that all binary strings will appear somewhere in the binary representation of the number). A "normal number" [1] satisfies this property. And it is believed that Pi is a normal number.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number

Re: An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]

#35

Post by ddalex »

So the obvious bit here is that an adversarial actor can poison the blockchain with bits that make downloading, storing and processing the blockchain a highly illegal act.

This may have a chilling effect on participating in the network, thus reducing the number of nodes, and undermining the trust on the blockchain and in the coin because the reduced requirement of computing power needed to mutate the blockchain.

Accordingly a determined actor with enough resources (e.g. a nation-state) can render the bitcoin value-less and use-less at will....

Re: An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]

#36

Post by cstross »

rogual wrote: post #33

Isn't intent generally a big deal in law? If I argued that your innocent MS Word doc was illegal because it decoded to child abuse images under a special encoding scheme I just made up, I'd be laughed out of court, and rightly so. It's technically true, but irrelevant. No crime was committed. Doesn't the same principle apply here?

In the UK (and, I believe, the USA) child pornography is a "strict liability" issue — intent is irrelevant, mere possession is itself illegal. This is how teens get nailed for receiving unasked-for sexts from their under-age-of-consent SO.

As with illegal drugs and, in the UK, unlicensed firearms, this means the prosecution doesn't need to prove intent. (Mandatory — usually harsh — sentence terms are usually part of the package with strict liability offenses.)

Re: An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]

#37

Post by Tomte »

zeth___ wrote: post #17
Tomte wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no need to legalize child porn just because you think it's necessary for "computers".

You already have hundreds of gigabytes of child porn on your computer. What you lack is a program to decode them consistently (I hope). You can read digital information in any way you please. An image is fundamentally two numbers that give you the height and width and a bunch of number triplets that give you the color values for the pixels inside. You can always find a transformation from any number to any image give…

You're so clever!

If only anyone had ever thought of it. He could then have written "What Colour are your bits?".

Re: An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]

#39

Post by phkahler »

ddalex wrote: post #35

So the obvious bit here is that an adversarial actor can poison the blockchain with bits that make downloading, storing and processing the blockchain a highly illegal act. This may have a chilling effect on participating in the network, thus reducing the number of nodes, and undermining the trust on the blockchain and in the coin because the reduced requirement of computing power needed to mutate the blockchain. Acco…

In addition to illegal content, one could just put a huge amount of data in there to accelerate what seems to be a built in problem of ever increasing storage requirements.

Re: An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]

#40

Post by runeb »

cstross wrote: post #36
rogual wrote: post #33

Isn't intent generally a big deal in law? If I argued that your innocent MS Word doc was illegal because it decoded to child abuse images under a special encoding scheme I just made up, I'd be laughed out of court, and rightly so. It's technically true, but irrelevant. No crime was committed. Doesn't the same principle apply here?

In the UK (and, I believe, the USA) child pornography is a "strict liability" issue — intent is irrelevant, mere possession is itself illegal. This is how teens get nailed for receiving unasked-for sexts from their under-age-of-consent SO. As with illegal drugs and, in the UK, unlicensed firearms, this means the prosecution doesn't need to prove intent. (Mandatory — usually harsh — sentence terms are usually part of…

So if a person sees you are about to have your phone searched by police they can send you child pornography and you will go to jail? It somehow doesn't sound like it would hold up in court. At least I feel like it should not.
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