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Some interesting graffiti on the bitcoin blockchain: http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photographs.html http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii

Some interesting graffiti on the bitcoin blockchain: http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photographs.html http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photo... I have always wondered this. What will a country do if someone embeds child pornography or a picture of Mohammed or something in the blockchain? Will it then be illegal to store the blockchain in that country? Is a link to such an image much different to an actual image? It seems hard to ever stop this happening with a public permissionless blockchain, pretty much by design.

bb88 9y ago
> What will a country do if someone embeds child pornography or a picture of Mohammed or something in the blockchain? In the US at least, I'd hope that we probably wouldn't criminalize 1M people for the actions of 1. Hopefully in other countries they wouldn't do that either.
- aiCeivi9 9y ago
  Well it depends. If blockchain stored on disk directly contains knows know illegal content it will be picked up by some scanners used by law enforcement. Just like pirated software it won't be enough on it's own but might be a good leverage in the original case that caused computer hardware seizure.
  - bb88 9y ago
    In piracy, you had the _intent_ of doing something, and that's illegal, regardless of whether or not you had the knowledge it was illegal. In this case, you have an idea that child porn is illegal, but you had no idea it was coming through your blockchain. Those are very different cases.
- Tepix 9y ago
  There is a possibility of a technical solution: - You create a special rule for a block known to contain illegal data. - The illegal data in the block gets NULLed. The other transactions are left untouched. - The checksum for the next block is no longer calculated, instead it is hardcoded. This means there is no way of verifying the transactions in that block. Perhaps you add a new signature for the block with the NULLed data to make it harder to tamper with. Once you start doing this workaround once you will probably have to do it repeatedly.
  - alphydan 9y ago
    Wouldn't that allow a 'denial-of-service' like attack? You keep sending illegal content over and over and the next block is never attained. Maybe I am misunderstanding the process.
    - gus_massa 9y ago
      I think it will not be a 'denial-of-service' attack but a 'denial-of-decentralization' attack. You can modify an old block and skip all the signatures calculation if everyone agree to take the last block as valid in spite it has a broken chain of calculations. Somewhat similar to the ETH/ETC hard fork. But there has to he some kind of centralized group that bless the new block. Also, a new client and miner software must be released. Perhaps a new version every time an illegal item is included, or perhaps the program can check the list automatically in a website. In both case, it will break the decentralization.
  - bb88 9y ago
    1. That kind of defeats the point of the blockchain. 2. The problem is a technical one as a result of a blockchain allowing content other than financial transactions to be a part of the record.
gsich 9y ago
The first one would be horrible. The second one, eeh who cares. Not much you can do about it anyway.
- AndrewOMartin 9y ago
  Certain people.
  - gsich 9y ago
    Their problem then.
    - AndrewOMartin 9y ago
      If they wield any political power then they can make it other a problem for other people too.
      - gsich 9y ago
        Those are usually not democratic countries anyway.
- Moodles 9y ago
  Just to be clear: I'm not suggesting we should implement blasphemy laws :-)
zeth___ 9y ago
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 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.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime Until we change the laws we have to meet the needs of digital computers instead of the printing press we will have these ridiculous ways of attacking useful new technology.
- Tomte 9y ago
  I have no need to legalize child porn just because you think it's necessary for "computers".
  - zeth___ 9y ago
    You already have hundreds of gigabytes of child porn on your computer. What you lack is a program to decode them consistently (I hope). You can read digital information in any way you please. An image is fundamentally two numbers that give you the height and width and a bunch of number triplets that give you the color values for the pixels inside. You can always find a transformation from any number to any image given you allow the transformation function to be odd enough. To put it simply, you sound like this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VB3uQHa14g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VB3uQHa14g When trying to outlaw some numbers in some situations.
    - Tomte 9y ago
      You're so clever! If only anyone had ever thought of it. He could then have written "What Colour are your bits?".
      - zeth___ 9y ago
        You are extremely hostile and unhelpful in this discussion. If you want to drag discourse down there are a lot of other forums where one line replies signaling you know something profound without actually saying anything are acceptable. HN is not one of these.
philfrasty 9y ago
There was a tweet [1] from Vitalik Buterin on this exact topic. He was arguing that „possession“ (as in data on the blockchain) does not impose risks on others. Tweet was removed quickly. [1] https://steemit.com/ethereum/@titusfrost/ethereum-s-vitalik-buterin-advocates-for-child-porn-eth-try-eos https://steemit.com/ethereum/@titusfrost/ethereum-s-vitalik-...
- zeth___ 9y ago
  > This entire Ethereum to me wreaks of New World Order involvement, just look at the members of the Ethereum Alliance. > Also I would suggest trying EOS which is supposed to wipe out Ethereum and hopefully will. I now fully endorse EOS as an alternative to Ethereum. > I also wanted to address the slanderous attacks against me stating that I am an "Anti-Semite" which is completely bogus. I criticize Zionists who are at the very top of the New World Order Power structure, just under the Jesuits. What the fuck did I just read?
  - tzahola 9y ago
    Some quality tinfoil-hat journalism.
  - OldFatCactus 9y ago
    it's people like him that make me wary of the crypto fad
  - luxnoo 9y ago
    > New World Order I've memed this online and to friends. It doesn't help that one Ethereum Foundation member was celebrating on twitter about how esoteric people are in the EF even saying that there are oculist members.
OscarCunningham 9y ago
The paper says that the bitcoin blockchain already contains illegal content. In particular copyrighted material and possible child pornography. More precisely: >an image depicting mild nudity of a young woman. In an online forum this image is claimed to show child pornography, albeit this claim cannot be verified (I don't know exactly what it would mean to "verify" that an image contains child pornography, since in the US and UK at least some of the relevant laws refer only to what the image "depicts", not to the age of the people used in its manufacture. Either way, the copyrighted content seems enough to establish the illegality of the blockchain in principle.) It seems unlikely that any prosecutions will happen though, because blockchain technology has a lot of mainstream support.

bb88 9y ago

> What will a country do if someone embeds child pornography or a picture of Mohammed or something in the blockchain? In the US at least, I'd hope that we probably wouldn't criminalize 1M people for the actions of 1. Hopefully in other countries they wouldn't do that either.

aiCeivi9 9y ago
Well it depends. If blockchain stored on disk directly contains knows know illegal content it will be picked up by some scanners used by law enforcement. Just like pirated software it won't be enough on it's own but might be a good leverage in the original case that caused computer hardware seizure.
- bb88 9y ago
  In piracy, you had the _intent_ of doing something, and that's illegal, regardless of whether or not you had the knowledge it was illegal. In this case, you have an idea that child porn is illegal, but you had no idea it was coming through your blockchain. Those are very different cases.
Tepix 9y ago
There is a possibility of a technical solution: - You create a special rule for a block known to contain illegal data. - The illegal data in the block gets NULLed. The other transactions are left untouched. - The checksum for the next block is no longer calculated, instead it is hardcoded. This means there is no way of verifying the transactions in that block. Perhaps you add a new signature for the block with the NULLed data to make it harder to tamper with. Once you start doing this workaround once you will probably have to do it repeatedly.
- alphydan 9y ago
  Wouldn't that allow a 'denial-of-service' like attack? You keep sending illegal content over and over and the next block is never attained. Maybe I am misunderstanding the process.
  - gus_massa 9y ago
    I think it will not be a 'denial-of-service' attack but a 'denial-of-decentralization' attack. You can modify an old block and skip all the signatures calculation if everyone agree to take the last block as valid in spite it has a broken chain of calculations. Somewhat similar to the ETH/ETC hard fork. But there has to he some kind of centralized group that bless the new block. Also, a new client and miner software must be released. Perhaps a new version every time an illegal item is included, or perhaps the program can check the list automatically in a website. In both case, it will break the decentralization.
- bb88 9y ago
  1. That kind of defeats the point of the blockchain. 2. The problem is a technical one as a result of a blockchain allowing content other than financial transactions to be a part of the record.

gsich 9y ago

The first one would be horrible. The second one, eeh who cares. Not much you can do about it anyway.

AndrewOMartin 9y ago
Certain people.
- gsich 9y ago
  Their problem then.
  - AndrewOMartin 9y ago
    If they wield any political power then they can make it other a problem for other people too.
    - gsich 9y ago
      Those are usually not democratic countries anyway.
Moodles 9y ago
Just to be clear: I'm not suggesting we should implement blasphemy laws :-)

zeth___ 9y ago

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 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.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime Until we change the laws we have to meet the needs of digital computers instead of the printing press we will have these ridiculous ways of attacking useful new technology.

Tomte 9y ago
I have no need to legalize child porn just because you think it's necessary for "computers".
- zeth___ 9y ago
  You already have hundreds of gigabytes of child porn on your computer. What you lack is a program to decode them consistently (I hope). You can read digital information in any way you please. An image is fundamentally two numbers that give you the height and width and a bunch of number triplets that give you the color values for the pixels inside. You can always find a transformation from any number to any image given you allow the transformation function to be odd enough. To put it simply, you sound like this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VB3uQHa14g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VB3uQHa14g When trying to outlaw some numbers in some situations.
  - Tomte 9y ago
    You're so clever! If only anyone had ever thought of it. He could then have written "What Colour are your bits?".
    - zeth___ 9y ago
      You are extremely hostile and unhelpful in this discussion. If you want to drag discourse down there are a lot of other forums where one line replies signaling you know something profound without actually saying anything are acceptable. HN is not one of these.

philfrasty 9y ago

There was a tweet [1] from Vitalik Buterin on this exact topic. He was arguing that „possession“ (as in data on the blockchain) does not impose risks on others. Tweet was removed quickly. [1] https://steemit.com/ethereum/@titusfrost/ethereum-s-vitalik-buterin-advocates-for-child-porn-eth-try-eos https://steemit.com/ethereum/@titusfrost/ethereum-s-vitalik-...

zeth___ 9y ago
> This entire Ethereum to me wreaks of New World Order involvement, just look at the members of the Ethereum Alliance. > Also I would suggest trying EOS which is supposed to wipe out Ethereum and hopefully will. I now fully endorse EOS as an alternative to Ethereum. > I also wanted to address the slanderous attacks against me stating that I am an "Anti-Semite" which is completely bogus. I criticize Zionists who are at the very top of the New World Order Power structure, just under the Jesuits. What the fuck did I just read?
- tzahola 9y ago
  Some quality tinfoil-hat journalism.
- OldFatCactus 9y ago
  it's people like him that make me wary of the crypto fad
- luxnoo 9y ago
  > New World Order I've memed this online and to friends. It doesn't help that one Ethereum Foundation member was celebrating on twitter about how esoteric people are in the EF even saying that there are oculist members.

OscarCunningham 9y ago

The paper says that the bitcoin blockchain already contains illegal content. In particular copyrighted material and possible child pornography. More precisely: >an image depicting mild nudity of a young woman. In an online forum this image is claimed to show child pornography, albeit this claim cannot be verified (I don't know exactly what it would mean to "verify" that an image contains child pornography, since in the US and UK at least some of the relevant laws refer only to what the image "depicts", not to the age of the people used in its manufacture. Either way, the copyrighted content seems enough to establish the illegality of the blockchain in principle.) It seems unlikely that any prosecutions will happen though, because blockchain technology has a lot of mainstream support.