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

Post by lopmotr » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 2:46 AM UTC

sgt101 wrote: post #145

lopmotr wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think child porn laws are too one-size-fits-all. It's supposed to be to be a disincentive to abusing children to produce the images for profit. Once it's well and truly public so the profit motive is gone, it should become legal. Or at least at the same status as revenge porn if the subjects are identifiable. Unfortunately, most people are too puritanical to even dare to think about the topic, let alone opens debat…

Every time one of those images is viewed it's an attack on the person in it, the person who could not, and never can give their consent. Also the normalisation of the behavior in the images enables abusers. The law is there to protect children, profit doesn't feature in the calculations.

Post by hndamien » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 4:17 AM UTC

mtgx wrote: post #18

How do you keep the blockchain uncensorable if you start accounting for child porn, and copyright, and all this other stuff that "needs to be taken down". And if you do all of those things, why even bother with the blockchain and all of its cons in the first place? All that remains is the completely accountable surveillance of users, and I believe that becoming a bigger surveillance machine than even Facebook ever wa…

Post by rogual » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 10:14 AM UTC

CamTin wrote: post #58

elmar wrote: post #31

Earlier 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…

Post by SAI_Peregrinus » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 5:15 PM UTC

VMG wrote: post #156

mlindner wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't seem to understand what Steganography is and how it works. Perhaps you should read that article. You cannot produce illegal information out of non-illegal information without having that illegal information somewhere else to use as a key.

https://i.imgur.com/tn6dav0.png the "key" is a very simple algorithm, that is obviously not illegal

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 20, 2018, 11:47 PM UTC

VMG wrote: post #158

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in that case the second image was already stored in (low significance portions) the first. A truly innocuous image won't have such stored data.

That not important. My point is that you could unknowningly store illegal data, without blockchain being involved. Anyone sharing the data by torrenting an apparently legal file, reposting an image, or quoting a text could redistribute potentially illegal data. This problem is not constrained to blockchain.