Haha what a bunch of clowns...
Which part of permissionless do they not understand?
But what else to expect from idling academics on gov payroll?
An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]
91–100 of 162 posts
Re: An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
You don't even need the ability to record metadata on-chain to encode arbitrary data. An agreed-upon method of encoding it into ordinary transactions is enough. Even if BTC-style transactions were just inputs/outputs (they're not), you could still encode information down into the satoshi-place of the inputs or outputs themselves. It's even worse for something like Ethereum: essentially the whole point of that blockch…
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Re: An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]
#93So 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…
The data embedded in the blockchain can only be extracted using custom tools. Custom tools can be used to extract any data from almost any other kind of other data, using steganography. You can extract illegal data from innocuous looking tweets, using the right tools.
As per my other post here, you don't need anything more than a file to hex converter like http://tomeko.net/online_tools/hex_to_file.php?lang=en and the ability to calculate the gas cost to post on the Ethereum blockchain (second largest coin by market cap and transaction volume).
Re: An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]
#94Not too long ago, I checked the number of images that were posted on the Ethereum blockchain and I also posted a test image ( https://etherscan.io/tx/0x3ee5575306ddc235b0586984172888b47e... ). There were 74 images with headers that appeared as jpg, gif, or png already posted before my test image. It's very easy to post to the Ethereum blockchain: just convert back and forth from file to hex using a site like http://t…
Does etherscan let you search the "Input Data" of a transaction? I can see somebody building a script to parse the blockchain for image headers and convert the hex to a file now that this 'idea' has hit the mainstream. Going to be interesting to see what happens with this.
Re: An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]
#95Not too long ago, I checked the number of images that were posted on the Ethereum blockchain and I also posted a test image ( https://etherscan.io/tx/0x3ee5575306ddc235b0586984172888b47e... ). There were 74 images with headers that appeared as jpg, gif, or png already posted before my test image. It's very easy to post to the Ethereum blockchain: just convert back and forth from file to hex using a site like http://t…
Does etherscan let you search the "Input Data" of a transaction? I can see somebody building a script to parse the blockchain for image headers and convert the hex to a file now that this 'idea' has hit the mainstream. Going to be interesting to see what happens with this.
I wrote the script to parse the Ethereum blockchain from a local copy myself.
Re: An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]
#96> We thus believe that future blockchain designs must proactively cope with objectionable content.
The MimbleWimble blockchain design [1] on the other hand doesn't leave any room to add freely chosen data, mostly due to the lack of any form of scripts.
Re: An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
>> one could just put a huge amount of data in there That, ah, isn't how that works. You can't just dump terabytes into the blockchain for BTC, LTC, or really any blockchain I can think of that has any sort of adoption.
Always wondered how IPFS deals with this
Re: An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]
#98So 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…
>an adversarial actor can poison the blockchain with bits that make downloading, storing and processing the blockchain a highly illegal act. Exactly. I brought up the same scenario recently.[1] The top 2 replies to my comment was basically, "unless you're looking for illegal data, it's not a problem." That head-in-the-sand ignorance completely misses the point. It's not about how _you_ specifically ignore illegal dat…
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Re: An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
The data embedded in the blockchain can only be extracted using custom tools. Custom tools can be used to extract any data from almost any other kind of other data, using steganography. You can extract illegal data from innocuous looking tweets, using the right tools.
If said tweets were reported they would (probably?) be deleted. I'm not sure the "custom tool" defense would really work, you could say the same thing for warez on usenet or even simple jpegs and videos, you need special codecs to view them. Furthermore even plain text embedded in the chain might be enough to get you in trouble in some jurisdiction if it contains hate speech, personal info or harassment material for…
What's meant by "containing"? Regular wallet software doesn't allow access to anything besides transaction data. You won't be able to view any text or images.
The number "Pi" contains all hate speech and other illegal content imaginable.
Re: An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]
#100Title is sensationalism. Actual paper title is "A Quantitative Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin" — see also Illegal Numbers [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
Thanks, we've reverted the title from the submitted “Illegal content embedded in the blockchain” to that of the paper.