51–60 of 62 posts
Of all the things threatening bitcoin this is by far the least worrisome. What if people start writing links to censored/illegal content on circulating dollar bills? Nothing, that's what.
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A link to child pornography, perhaps, with which law enforcement would have an excuse to make any selected bitcoin user's life a living hell.
A link to insert boogeyman here which is also on the hard disks of a few hundred thousand other people, downloaded automatically, and stored in a file with a dozen other gigs of bitcoin transaction data. Sounds like an airtight case.
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A link to child pornography, perhaps, with which law enforcement would have an excuse to make any selected bitcoin user's life a living hell.
A link to something isn't possession of something. Any URL might become worthless anyway once the real offending source material is removed.
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"What can you say in 20 bytes that can have permanent, material damage to human beings?" The AACS encryption key was 16 bytes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy In general, private keys are in that range of byte size.
They were, indirectly, drawing attention the non-import of that particular byte sequence - it literally does not matter, and the whole thing was to illustrate that a) you can't censor tiny speech effectively and b) DRM is doomed and the keys will always be reverse-engineered. Saying something meaningful enough to get someone jailed for possessing a drive with the string on it (the criteria for this to be actually har…
In a sensible legal regime, sure. In a legal regime looking for an excuse to shut down BitCoin? Easily done. Technically the AACS key is still illegal. I think the latter rather than the former is more accurately the threat.
But then, if a legal regime is looking to shut down BitCoin they already have plenty of avenues. It already looks an awful lot like money laundering, for instance. So this line of thought is garbage... but only because there's no way any legal system would have to stretch this far to attack BitCoin, because they've got a wide variety of far more plausible attacks. It's not exactly the BitCoin-friendly line of argument you might be hoping for.
I believe that there is an even more important practical issue. What if someone manages to embed something very much like the EICER string[0] in it? How many people do you think would use the bitcoin client on windows if their AV automatically deleted the blockchain as it downloaded in a misguided attempt to protect them? Of course, first we have to know if this is possible at all. Does anyone know if there's either…
The flaw in all of this is that you're embedding 20 bytes in the blockchain. In order to do that, you have to choose an encoding method. In order to get the embedded data back out, you have to convey the encoding method and which block is encoded with it to the recipient. Which is totally pointless because if you can convey that to the recipient then you might as well just use the same communications method to convey…
The "encoding method" is ASCII text. The data can be extracted by running "strings *.dat" on the block chain on any UNIX system. After that you can grep through the output. This is not like XORing data, or as some people have said "everything occurs somewhere in the digits of pi". The blockchain in no sense encodes all possible values, or a fraction thereof, the data is trivial to extract. This is much more like, it'…
An encoding method is ASCII text. You could use ASCII compressed with gzip, or bzip2, or lzma. You could use Unicode. You could use a previous block as the key and encrypt with AES, or Blowfish, or 3DES. You could store an IP address and port rather than a URL as the first six binary octets. Or encode the IP using base64, or hex.
No matter what you use, you have to convey that to the party you're trying to communicate the information with -- you at least have to convey the fact that you've encoded something in the blockchain so that the receiver knows to look for it there. How is it easier to convey "you should download the bitcoin blockchain and run strings against it and the URL is the 352nd one you find [out of the six thousand URLs various unrelated people will have encoded]" than to just send the damn URL directly to the person you're telling where to look for it?
>This may or may not be a problem for bitcoin, but I think it is legally problematic at the moment. This may move us toward a world where it's not illegal to store any particular data or even distribute it. The illegal act might be the viewing or "distribution with intent" or the data. I think that would be an interesting development.
I think it would be a welcome development. Right now people are too afraid to be distributors, which makes things difficult for whistle blowers and democracy advocates in oppressive regimes and others who have legitimate reasons to want anonymous censorship-resistant publication methods.
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The "encoding method" is ASCII text. The data can be extracted by running "strings *.dat" on the block chain on any UNIX system. After that you can grep through the output. This is not like XORing data, or as some people have said "everything occurs somewhere in the digits of pi". The blockchain in no sense encodes all possible values, or a fraction thereof, the data is trivial to extract. This is much more like, it'…
>The "encoding method" is ASCII text. An encoding method is ASCII text. You could use ASCII compressed with gzip, or bzip2, or lzma. You could use Unicode. You could use a previous block as the key and encrypt with AES, or Blowfish, or 3DES. You could store an IP address and port rather than a URL as the first six binary octets. Or encode the IP using base64, or hex. No matter what you use, you have to convey that to…
So to my mind it's not that different than a search engine. The blockchain doesn't just contain URLs it contains "meta data" as well. Right now, if you want to find links related to err, certain kinds of illegal photography you just have to search for the relevant keywords in the blockchain and you'll find it and the URLs.
"I think it would be a welcome development. Right now people are too afraid to be distributors, which makes things difficult for whistle blowers and democracy advocates in oppressive regimes and others who have legitimate reasons to want anonymous censorship-resistant publication methods."
Yes, I absolutely agree with you, we live in interesting times.
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one can also write/print information on currency bills and no one questioned bills.
Seriously? This is analogous to writing information of the plates used to print currency/every bill in the country, not scribbling a note onto a twenty. You're either a troll or you haven't read the post.
if it would be etched on forementioned plates, it would be perceivable for every bitcoin user in every transaction.
The flaw in all of this is that you're embedding 20 bytes in the blockchain. In order to do that, you have to choose an encoding method. In order to get the embedded data back out, you have to convey the encoding method and which block is encoded with it to the recipient. Which is totally pointless because if you can convey that to the recipient then you might as well just use the same communications method to convey…
The "encoding method" is ASCII text. The data can be extracted by running "strings *.dat" on the block chain on any UNIX system. After that you can grep through the output. This is not like XORing data, or as some people have said "everything occurs somewhere in the digits of pi". The blockchain in no sense encodes all possible values, or a fraction thereof, the data is trivial to extract. This is much more like, it'…