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

Post by VMG » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 9:40 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #160

VMG wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> My point is that you could unknowningly store illegal data, without blockchain being involved. The problem with blockchain is that a full node will be knowingly storing and distributing illegal content (or at least is likely to held to be, once the chain is widely known to be infested with such content.) The only way to.stop is to stop storing and interacting with the chain. With a torrent, you could be unknowingly…

There are many non-blockchain scenarios where there is difficult-to-remove data. How would one deal with embedded illegal data stored in firmware? Public records?

And which subsets of illegal data are legal?

Post by chrisabrams » Wed, Mar 21, 2018, 8:40 PM UTC

cesarb wrote: post #77

oasisbob wrote: post #52

This gets close to something else I've been pondering lately - how to deal with immutable data structures in the realm of GDPR. Recitations in GDPR require systems to be designed with privacy in mind. Immutable structures like the Bitcoin blockchain or Merkle trees in other applications would seem to be fundamentally incompatible with some GDPR privacy requirements. Let's say Google receives a valid right to be forgo…

Some immutable data structures can cope with missing data. Merkle trees are an example: to validate that a leaf is part of the tree, you don't need any of the other leafs (only their direct or indirect hashes). For the Bitcoin blockchain, it has been designed so that transactions where all outputs have been spent can be pruned, after the spending transactions have been validated. It wouldn't be hard to extend this to…

You would still have the history of those transaction(s) before they were pruned though...

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

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