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…
Especially if you consider the possibility of someone loading state secrets onto the chain. It wouldn't take a state actor to initiate that action, but that state actor could render the chain worthless.
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…
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 the extraction tools do not exceed the cryptographic complexity of a OTP cipher, I doubt that any court will accept that excuse.
It's the difference between taking random bits of your computer to assemble illegal content vs taking one specific set of bits and applying mere transforms to then to retrieve illegal content.
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…
I'm reading this charitably as you saying that laws that criminalise distribution regardless of intent or knowledge need to be changed to recognise that with the internet people can effectively commit crimes without knowledge or intent. This is particularly relevant where distribution of material (child porn, terrorist material) is criminalised. This seems a really difficult area that's almost incompatible with the w…
Your comment really shows how far we've slid away from the Mens Rea requirement in law. It used to be that every major crime required an intent component. Where the crime was serious enough we had lesser punishments where there was no intent (e.g. manslaughter vs murder).
In the old days it was unfathomable you could be locked up for something you didn't know was a crime.
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…
I thought the same thing about PGP/GPG keyservers. They are supposed to be immutable so if someone uploaded a key containing a jpeg attachment depicting illegal content, the only course of action would be to wipe every server in the network.
Keyservers are convenient but they're not critical to PGP's functionality. There are other ways to distribute public keys. Actually in general public key servers are only mildly useful because you can't really trust anything you get from them, you have to use your web of trust of some other way to validate that the key is valid.
On the other hand if you wipe (even partially) Bitcoin's blockchain your basically destroy the currency.
Wouldn't that make cyberbullying and slander even in its most extreme forms legal? In those cases often someone is being harmed (with real, flesh space consequences), despite the material being nothing more then numbers.
Slander and cyberbullying are civil law, not criminal law.
But it's just digital information, as you mentioned. It never enters flesh space as real.
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 prune "illegal" transactions, even after they've been included in valid blocks; the only consequence would be that a node wouldn't be able to validate other transactions spending these "illegal" transactions (so it would have to risk accepting an invalid transaction, or rejecting a valid transaction, in both cases risking being on the wrong side of a fork).
I'm reading this charitably as you saying that laws that criminalise distribution regardless of intent or knowledge need to be changed to recognise that with the internet people can effectively commit crimes without knowledge or intent. This is particularly relevant where distribution of material (child porn, terrorist material) is criminalised. This seems a really difficult area that's almost incompatible with the w…
Your comment really shows how far we've slid away from the Mens Rea requirement in law. It used to be that every major crime required an intent component. Where the crime was serious enough we had lesser punishments where there was no intent (e.g. manslaughter vs murder). In the old days it was unfathomable you could be locked up for something you didn't know was a crime.
> In the old days it was unfathomable you could be locked up for something you didn't know was a crime.
There are edge cases where you may escape punishment (Verbotsirrtum) but only if it was unavoidable that you erred. Involuntarily distributing child porn may carry lesser punishment, but it will certainly be investigate unless you can assert a privilege such as common carrier status or inability to control the transmission, as for example Tor nodes could.
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…
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.
That's a bit of a stretch. There's no reason to obfuscate anything (unless miners are actively and intentionally censoring content) and it'd be straightforward to make a browser.
For example, I don't think it's a defense for the owner of a website to say "this horrible illegal content I'm sharing is only accessible via a custom tool that downloads and decodes image data from me...such as a web browser."
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?
I think it is technically impossible at least improbable to make such encoding scheme, unless your encoding becomes the content itself.