7 ms·

Child abuse images hidden in crypto-currency block chain

51 points by adzicg 8y ago

abhi1311 8y ago
adsadadas
aboutruby 8y ago
So is it going to be illegal to have the full blockchain data? That could prevent a lot of miners from operating
tivert 8y ago
So, possession of the Bitcoin blockchain is now illegal, according to the laws of most developed countries.
- Hello71 8y ago
  This is "Bitcoin Satoshi Vision", which is completely different and appears from a quick Google search to be completely irrelevant.
  - afgkonionio 8y ago
    Of course it's completely irrelevant. It's a cryptocurrency. For a cryptocurrency, it's relatively important. It's not one of the big boys, but it's supposedly worth $1 billion.
  - AJ007 8y ago
    A fork of a Bitcoin fork (Bitcoin Cash.) And presumably this must lead to another fork prior to when the illegal content was inserted. The alternatives being, it isn't a real blockchain at all, or all of the users become criminals. From the singular blockchain to forks of forks, the typical misinformed person's vision of all of this must be profoundly distant from the source of truth. At least it makes a good case study in why trademarks are helpful.
blincoln 8y ago
Possession of this type of image is a federal crime in the US.[1] When I took a digital forensics course about five years ago, we were told that if we ever discovered any on a system we were investigating, it needed to be reported to the FBI immediately or we could also be charged. If someone does this in a way that goes unnoticed, and it's discovered after long enough that rolling back is impractical, does that effectively kill the blockchain where the data is embedded, at least as far as the US and countries with similar laws are concerned? [1] https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-federal-law-child-pornography https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-fede...
- gjs278 8y ago
  you better report this now or else you’ll go to jail, right?
- Tepix 8y ago
  Related: What's the smallest piece of data that qualifies? Can a 16x16 image be illegal? What about a 64x64 image? What's the situation like if you have two chunks of data (perhaps at two separate locations on the blockchain) and only if you XOR them you get the illegal image?
  - anotheryou 8y ago
    Taking your last step further: Is any half illegal? Or only the one created at a later date? Reminds me of the library of babel https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?wvlbf.j,qkfjo,wpyrdag,jmlr44 https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?wvlbf.j,qkfjo,wpyrd...
    - giornogiovanna 8y ago
      Well either half is utterly meaningless without the other, and could actually be arbitrary, right? So you'd have to have them both together for it to be illegal.
      - 8y ago
jasode 8y ago
The inevitability of "defacing" the blockchain was discussed back in May 2017 as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14434786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14434786 Global public blockchains are too tempting a target for that type of thing. It will interesting to see how this plays out and whether government agencies respond (or ignore it).
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  > It will interesting to see how this plays out and whether government agencies respond (or ignore it)...* I don't think I'd count on government agencies ignoring child abuse images.
momentmaker 8y ago
So, the easiest for the government to destroy blockchain is to supplant their own illegal images onto the blockchain themselves...
- chris_mc 8y ago
  The easiest way is just to let the *coin fad die out and blockchains be relegated to genuine necessary uses and/or the dust pile of history.
- egwynn 8y ago
  “supplant” != “plant"
- 21 8y ago
  No, the easiest for the government to destroy blockchain is to just declare it illegal.
  - sambull 8y ago
    Is there a difference? Is it easier to pass laws specifically outlawing something, or to dismantle something with current laws?
  - jMyles 8y ago
    Do you seriously think that will be effective? Have you never heard of marijuana?
    - 21 8y ago
      Well, in that case embedding child porn on it will not help either, would it? I was just highlighting the massive fallacy of parent.
      - jMyles 8y ago
        I think that attempting to pretextually take action based on some threat (and let's be honest, "think of the children" is one of the primary vectors for this) is more likely to curry political favor (and provide political cover) than mere censorship. So yes, I think that embedding illicit material is a more likely tactic than prohibition. The latter - because it will be such a colossal failure - will only serve to show the state's inability to control the internet, and that's exactly what the state is trying to hide right now.
giornogiovanna 8y ago
> He said there was "ongoing research" to find ways to remove such content from block chains but these were "not yet mature". Either you have centralization, which nobody wants, or you have a bot that everyone agrees on to censor things, and people will will always find ways around bots. Are there really any other alternatives?
- anonymousDan 8y ago
  I've seen some recent research proposals: https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/sp/2019/6660/00/666000a629-abs.html https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/sp/2019/6660/00/66... The basic idea is you have a way to delete the data associated with an old transaction but not the transaction itself. A majority have to agree to the redaction though and the fact something has been redacted is recorded.
- mayniac 8y ago
  The easiest solution is probably just limiting how much data you can add to the ledger. There's no real reason why people need to add more than 10kb of information to a transaction. Cryptocurrencies aren't meant to be image hosting platforms anyway.
  - kennywinker 8y ago
    Images can be split into 10kb blobs...
    - mayniac 8y ago
      Then there's also a million other ways to store or transmit images if you use tiny segments. Encode the image in base64 and you can use Twitter, reddit comments, SMS etc. The point is to make it unfeasibly hard to store/send the images, not impossible.
  - neuralzen 8y ago
    That isn't exactly true, the whole reason IPFS and Filecoin exists is to supply this service.
clarkmoody 8y ago
People were worried about this in 2011. I haven't heard of any doors getting kicked for having a copy of the blockchain.
ilikehurdles 8y ago
BSV is, apparently, yet another bitcoin fork — it’s a 4 month old Chinese bitcoin fork with 1 released version and a very vague website[1]. BBC does not explain at all how this differs from Bitcoin or the relevance of this coin. [1]: https://bitcoinsv.io https://bitcoinsv.io
- bdcravens 8y ago
  It’s principally backed by Craig Wright (Australian with dubious claim of being Satoshi, original creator of Bitcoin) and Calvin Ayre (investor born in Canada). I wouldn’t categorize it as Chinese (Bitcoin Cash/BCH is probably better categorized that way, being backed by Bitmain)
  - ilikehurdles 8y ago
    Thanks for the correction. I was assuming going off the Chinese flag on their site and the vague descriptions.
Sir_Substance 8y ago
Ah, this old chestnut. So from the last time this came up: https://thebitcoinnews.com/no-there-isnt-child-porn-on-the-bitcoin-blockchain/ https://thebitcoinnews.com/no-there-isnt-child-porn-on-the-b... With the important bit here: 80 bytes is all that OP_RETURN can store, and what’s more that information is subject to deletion. That’s because bitcoin nodes are capable of pruning “provably unspendable” UTXOs for efficiency, which include OP_RETURN data. TL;DR the last time the schadenfreudists were looking for something to point and laugh at on this front, they didn't understand the technicalities of what they were talking about _at all_. This BBC article makes an interesting claim: "In January, the amount of data that could be added to the BSV block chain was increased significantly. Before that, people could generally add only short chunks of text or web links to the block chain. But now it is possible to add full images in an encoded format." I've never heard of this BSV coin before, so I don't know the details of this change. Assuming it's a fork of bitcoin and all they did was increase the allowable size of the OP_RETURN, this will once again be sensationalist reporting with no substance. I'd imagine the first thing BSV nodes would do is prune the OP_RETURN garbage because who wants to be paying the storage cost of other peoples embedded images? But hey, the BBC article is extremely light on details. Maybe this is something that can't be pruned so easily? Does anyone know?
- detaro 8y ago
  Following links from the article: https://blog.moneybutton.com/2019/01/26/how-we-added-support-for-giant-op_return-data-in-money-button/ https://blog.moneybutton.com/2019/01/26/how-we-added-support... https://www.yours.org/content/the-unfuckening-of-op_return-b10d2c4b52da https://www.yours.org/content/the-unfuckening-of-op_return-b... "We’re about to take the red pill and see how deep the rabbit hole of on chain data storage really goes. Tokenized is ready for this, yours.org is ready for this, @_unwriter and his plethora of tools are ready for this as are others. Calvin Ayre has previously spoken of the ‘Cambrian explosion’ of creativity and I believe that unbounded-by-anything-except-fees data storage will be a key trigger for this."
  - Sir_Substance 8y ago
    Yep, so it is OP_RETURN and therefore can and will be pruned.
21 8y ago
> Returning to our analogy, the publisher of a best-selling book might announce that the first letter of every line in the book can be interpreted as a sequence of pixels that represents a pornographic image of a child. Can the police then arrest owners of the book? Common sense suggests that the answer is no, and most lawyers would agree. https://www.wired.com/story/why-porn-on-the-blockchain-wont-doom-bitcoin/ https://www.wired.com/story/why-porn-on-the-blockchain-wont-...
AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
Aren't we getting back to the hypothetical question that any image, digitally encoded, would theoretically exist at some index of any infinite number (e.g. Pi), given enough digits? Is the possession of Pi then illegal?
- giornogiovanna 8y ago
  Very far-off digits of π (assuming π is even a normal number) are not easily accessed or enumerated. In fact, you'd probably need more information to encode the index and length of your sequence than you would to just write the data out. In contrast, a block chain is easily downloaded and traversed, indices are small, and most importantly, there is a very, very obvious intent to distribute illegal content. I don't think that these situations are comparable.
  - saltvedt 8y ago
    "The Bailey–Borwein–Plouffe formula (BBP formula) is a spigot algorithm for computing the nth binary digit of the mathematical constant π using base-16 representation. The formula can directly calculate the value of any given digit of π without calculating the preceding digits. (...) Though the BBP formula can directly calculate the value of any given digit of π with less computational effort than formulas that must calculate all intervening digits, BBP remains linearithmic (O(n log n)), whereby successively larger values of n require increasingly more time to calculate; that is, the "further out" a digit is, the longer it takes BBP to calculate it, just like the standard π-computing algorithms." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey%E2%80%93Borwein%E2%80%93Plouffe_formula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey%E2%80%93Borwein%E2%80%9...
- claudiawerner 8y ago
  No, because the law doesn't work on the principle of mathematical technicalities and possibilities, it attempts to work on the principle of reason. The question you should really be asking is whether a judge would deem that to be illegal and the answer is almost certainly "no".
wolco 8y ago
This makes me think. Any data in a certain form could be used to generate an image. What if someone added data in a form that only later after a viewer appeared will it reveal this type of content. This would make any system with that data immediately illegal. Looking down the road what it was encoded in dna would it be illegal for someone to read another person's dna? If someone had a tattoo on there face of one of these images would security cameras need to wipe any data caught?
- Tepix 8y ago
  Remember that every imaginable image is also somewhere in the digits of pi. You "just" have to find it. Does that make the number pi illegal? I guess not. Does it make programs illegal that can calculate those digits of pi? Doesn't sound reasonable, does it?
  - Andrex 8y ago
    Humans often aren't reasonable, nor are we computers with the capacity to instantly recall large sets of data (such as whatever billion digits of pi would be necessary to encode an image.) And U.S. law agrees: it's possible for numbers to be illegal, the same way certain speech is illegal, and in fact the same way certain images are illegal. It's mildly annoying on its surface but that dissipates when you stop and think about why things are the way they are. (It's possible I misread your comment and we agree.)
  - lalaland1125 8y ago
    This analogy to "storing information" in the digits in pi is simply incorrect. The reason why it's incorrect is that in order to "store information", your access key must by definition be smaller than the data you are storing. This is not the case for "hiding" things in the digits of pi. In general, the index offset needed to find something will have more bits than the target information. This is clearly not the case for storing information in a blockchain as you only need a small index to find the transaction.
  - msla 8y ago
    > Remember that every imaginable image is also somewhere in the digits of pi. This isn't known for sure. It depends on the digits of pi being normally distributed, which hasn't been proven.
decentralised 8y ago
This is old news. https://www.dailydot.com/business/bitcoin-child-porn-transaction-code/ https://www.dailydot.com/business/bitcoin-child-porn-transac... (2013) https://news.bitcoin.com/no-isnt-child-porn-bitcoin-blockchain/ https://news.bitcoin.com/no-isnt-child-porn-bitcoin-blockcha... https://www.wired.com/story/why-porn-on-the-blockchain-wont-doom-bitcoin/ https://www.wired.com/story/why-porn-on-the-blockchain-wont-...
miguelrochefort 8y ago
This is why data regulation will never work. GDPR and Copyrights included. Nothing can be done about it, short of banning blockchains.
bluewavescrash 8y ago
How do chains which value absolute immutability deal with this? Such as Ethereum Classic.
- gsich 8y ago
  They don't.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- 2019ideas 8y ago
  Or... you know... Bitcoin....
Proven 8y ago
Just FYI, on reddit they call this type of post a sxxxpost, and rightly so. What would actually be interesting is if somebody received a gag order and shared the info via OP_RETURN in direct violation of the order. And if the news wasn't years old.
shiado 8y ago
Given any arbitrary stored sequence of bytes, one can always devise an algorithm which converts those bytes into other meaningful sequences of bytes. This is interesting because it would appear that the liability of possessing CP on the blockchain is dependent on the ease of converting those bytes into a meaningful sequences of bytes of an image file, but where does it stop? Do the bytes have to be a raw sequence of exact image bytes stored contiguously? Does simply flipping the bits make the byte sequence lose enough 'meaning' to get rid of liability? If one requires the bytes alone to have the 'meaning', then what about image compression and the associated algorithms? There are some heavy-duty thought experiments with this type of problem that the courts are probably ill-equipped to address.
t0astbread 8y ago
I have multiple questions. > In addition, Money Button has banned the user that uploaded the material. > It has also put in place filtering systems to spot when anyone tries to upload similar content. > "We have all the information we need to track down criminals and prosecute them." Doesn't blockchain technology exist to prevent censorship and provide anonymity (in terms of not being able to link transactions to a real life identity)? So why would anyone want to use a client that collects and stores this kind of information about them? Doesn't it (almost) completely erase the point of having a blockchain in the first place? And how is this case handled now? Money Button said they forwarded the identity of the uploader to the authorities but is anyone gonna do anything about the problematic data?

51 points by adzicg 8y ago

abhi1311 8y ago

adsadadas

aboutruby 8y ago

So is it going to be illegal to have the full blockchain data? That could prevent a lot of miners from operating

tivert 8y ago

So, possession of the Bitcoin blockchain is now illegal, according to the laws of most developed countries.

Hello71 8y ago
This is "Bitcoin Satoshi Vision", which is completely different and appears from a quick Google search to be completely irrelevant.
- afgkonionio 8y ago
  Of course it's completely irrelevant. It's a cryptocurrency. For a cryptocurrency, it's relatively important. It's not one of the big boys, but it's supposedly worth $1 billion.
- AJ007 8y ago
  A fork of a Bitcoin fork (Bitcoin Cash.) And presumably this must lead to another fork prior to when the illegal content was inserted. The alternatives being, it isn't a real blockchain at all, or all of the users become criminals. From the singular blockchain to forks of forks, the typical misinformed person's vision of all of this must be profoundly distant from the source of truth. At least it makes a good case study in why trademarks are helpful.

blincoln 8y ago

Possession of this type of image is a federal crime in the US.[1] When I took a digital forensics course about five years ago, we were told that if we ever discovered any on a system we were investigating, it needed to be reported to the FBI immediately or we could also be charged. If someone does this in a way that goes unnoticed, and it's discovered after long enough that rolling back is impractical, does that effectively kill the blockchain where the data is embedded, at least as far as the US and countries with similar laws are concerned? [1] https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-federal-law-child-pornography https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-fede...

gjs278 8y ago
you better report this now or else you’ll go to jail, right?
Tepix 8y ago
Related: What's the smallest piece of data that qualifies? Can a 16x16 image be illegal? What about a 64x64 image? What's the situation like if you have two chunks of data (perhaps at two separate locations on the blockchain) and only if you XOR them you get the illegal image?
- anotheryou 8y ago
  Taking your last step further: Is any half illegal? Or only the one created at a later date? Reminds me of the library of babel https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?wvlbf.j,qkfjo,wpyrdag,jmlr44 https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?wvlbf.j,qkfjo,wpyrd...
  - giornogiovanna 8y ago
    Well either half is utterly meaningless without the other, and could actually be arbitrary, right? So you'd have to have them both together for it to be illegal.
    - 8y ago

jasode 8y ago

The inevitability of "defacing" the blockchain was discussed back in May 2017 as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14434786 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14434786 Global public blockchains are too tempting a target for that type of thing. It will interesting to see how this plays out and whether government agencies respond (or ignore it).

bilbo0s 8y ago
> It will interesting to see how this plays out and whether government agencies respond (or ignore it)...* I don't think I'd count on government agencies ignoring child abuse images.

momentmaker 8y ago

So, the easiest for the government to destroy blockchain is to supplant their own illegal images onto the blockchain themselves...

chris_mc 8y ago
The easiest way is just to let the *coin fad die out and blockchains be relegated to genuine necessary uses and/or the dust pile of history.
egwynn 8y ago
“supplant” != “plant"
21 8y ago
No, the easiest for the government to destroy blockchain is to just declare it illegal.
- sambull 8y ago
  Is there a difference? Is it easier to pass laws specifically outlawing something, or to dismantle something with current laws?
- jMyles 8y ago
  Do you seriously think that will be effective? Have you never heard of marijuana?
  - 21 8y ago
    Well, in that case embedding child porn on it will not help either, would it? I was just highlighting the massive fallacy of parent.
    - jMyles 8y ago
      I think that attempting to pretextually take action based on some threat (and let's be honest, "think of the children" is one of the primary vectors for this) is more likely to curry political favor (and provide political cover) than mere censorship. So yes, I think that embedding illicit material is a more likely tactic than prohibition. The latter - because it will be such a colossal failure - will only serve to show the state's inability to control the internet, and that's exactly what the state is trying to hide right now.

giornogiovanna 8y ago

> He said there was "ongoing research" to find ways to remove such content from block chains but these were "not yet mature". Either you have centralization, which nobody wants, or you have a bot that everyone agrees on to censor things, and people will will always find ways around bots. Are there really any other alternatives?

anonymousDan 8y ago
I've seen some recent research proposals: https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/sp/2019/6660/00/666000a629-abs.html https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/sp/2019/6660/00/66... The basic idea is you have a way to delete the data associated with an old transaction but not the transaction itself. A majority have to agree to the redaction though and the fact something has been redacted is recorded.
mayniac 8y ago
The easiest solution is probably just limiting how much data you can add to the ledger. There's no real reason why people need to add more than 10kb of information to a transaction. Cryptocurrencies aren't meant to be image hosting platforms anyway.
- kennywinker 8y ago
  Images can be split into 10kb blobs...
  - mayniac 8y ago
    Then there's also a million other ways to store or transmit images if you use tiny segments. Encode the image in base64 and you can use Twitter, reddit comments, SMS etc. The point is to make it unfeasibly hard to store/send the images, not impossible.
- neuralzen 8y ago
  That isn't exactly true, the whole reason IPFS and Filecoin exists is to supply this service.

clarkmoody 8y ago

People were worried about this in 2011. I haven't heard of any doors getting kicked for having a copy of the blockchain.

ilikehurdles 8y ago

BSV is, apparently, yet another bitcoin fork — it’s a 4 month old Chinese bitcoin fork with 1 released version and a very vague website[1]. BBC does not explain at all how this differs from Bitcoin or the relevance of this coin. [1]: https://bitcoinsv.io https://bitcoinsv.io

bdcravens 8y ago
It’s principally backed by Craig Wright (Australian with dubious claim of being Satoshi, original creator of Bitcoin) and Calvin Ayre (investor born in Canada). I wouldn’t categorize it as Chinese (Bitcoin Cash/BCH is probably better categorized that way, being backed by Bitmain)
- ilikehurdles 8y ago
  Thanks for the correction. I was assuming going off the Chinese flag on their site and the vague descriptions.

Sir_Substance 8y ago

Ah, this old chestnut. So from the last time this came up: https://thebitcoinnews.com/no-there-isnt-child-porn-on-the-bitcoin-blockchain/ https://thebitcoinnews.com/no-there-isnt-child-porn-on-the-b... With the important bit here: 80 bytes is all that OP_RETURN can store, and what’s more that information is subject to deletion. That’s because bitcoin nodes are capable of pruning “provably unspendable” UTXOs for efficiency, which include OP_RETURN data. TL;DR the last time the schadenfreudists were looking for something to point and laugh at on this front, they didn't understand the technicalities of what they were talking about _at all_. This BBC article makes an interesting claim: "In January, the amount of data that could be added to the BSV block chain was increased significantly. Before that, people could generally add only short chunks of text or web links to the block chain. But now it is possible to add full images in an encoded format." I've never heard of this BSV coin before, so I don't know the details of this change. Assuming it's a fork of bitcoin and all they did was increase the allowable size of the OP_RETURN, this will once again be sensationalist reporting with no substance. I'd imagine the first thing BSV nodes would do is prune the OP_RETURN garbage because who wants to be paying the storage cost of other peoples embedded images? But hey, the BBC article is extremely light on details. Maybe this is something that can't be pruned so easily? Does anyone know?

detaro 8y ago
Following links from the article: https://blog.moneybutton.com/2019/01/26/how-we-added-support-for-giant-op_return-data-in-money-button/ https://blog.moneybutton.com/2019/01/26/how-we-added-support... https://www.yours.org/content/the-unfuckening-of-op_return-b10d2c4b52da https://www.yours.org/content/the-unfuckening-of-op_return-b... "We’re about to take the red pill and see how deep the rabbit hole of on chain data storage really goes. Tokenized is ready for this, yours.org is ready for this, @_unwriter and his plethora of tools are ready for this as are others. Calvin Ayre has previously spoken of the ‘Cambrian explosion’ of creativity and I believe that unbounded-by-anything-except-fees data storage will be a key trigger for this."
- Sir_Substance 8y ago
  Yep, so it is OP_RETURN and therefore can and will be pruned.

21 8y ago

> Returning to our analogy, the publisher of a best-selling book might announce that the first letter of every line in the book can be interpreted as a sequence of pixels that represents a pornographic image of a child. Can the police then arrest owners of the book? Common sense suggests that the answer is no, and most lawyers would agree. https://www.wired.com/story/why-porn-on-the-blockchain-wont-doom-bitcoin/ https://www.wired.com/story/why-porn-on-the-blockchain-wont-...

AdmiralAsshat 8y ago

Aren't we getting back to the hypothetical question that any image, digitally encoded, would theoretically exist at some index of any infinite number (e.g. Pi), given enough digits? Is the possession of Pi then illegal?

giornogiovanna 8y ago
Very far-off digits of π (assuming π is even a normal number) are not easily accessed or enumerated. In fact, you'd probably need more information to encode the index and length of your sequence than you would to just write the data out. In contrast, a block chain is easily downloaded and traversed, indices are small, and most importantly, there is a very, very obvious intent to distribute illegal content. I don't think that these situations are comparable.
- saltvedt 8y ago
  "The Bailey–Borwein–Plouffe formula (BBP formula) is a spigot algorithm for computing the nth binary digit of the mathematical constant π using base-16 representation. The formula can directly calculate the value of any given digit of π without calculating the preceding digits. (...) Though the BBP formula can directly calculate the value of any given digit of π with less computational effort than formulas that must calculate all intervening digits, BBP remains linearithmic (O(n log n)), whereby successively larger values of n require increasingly more time to calculate; that is, the "further out" a digit is, the longer it takes BBP to calculate it, just like the standard π-computing algorithms." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey%E2%80%93Borwein%E2%80%93Plouffe_formula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey%E2%80%93Borwein%E2%80%9...
claudiawerner 8y ago
No, because the law doesn't work on the principle of mathematical technicalities and possibilities, it attempts to work on the principle of reason. The question you should really be asking is whether a judge would deem that to be illegal and the answer is almost certainly "no".

wolco 8y ago

This makes me think. Any data in a certain form could be used to generate an image. What if someone added data in a form that only later after a viewer appeared will it reveal this type of content. This would make any system with that data immediately illegal. Looking down the road what it was encoded in dna would it be illegal for someone to read another person's dna? If someone had a tattoo on there face of one of these images would security cameras need to wipe any data caught?

Tepix 8y ago
Remember that every imaginable image is also somewhere in the digits of pi. You "just" have to find it. Does that make the number pi illegal? I guess not. Does it make programs illegal that can calculate those digits of pi? Doesn't sound reasonable, does it?
- Andrex 8y ago
  Humans often aren't reasonable, nor are we computers with the capacity to instantly recall large sets of data (such as whatever billion digits of pi would be necessary to encode an image.) And U.S. law agrees: it's possible for numbers to be illegal, the same way certain speech is illegal, and in fact the same way certain images are illegal. It's mildly annoying on its surface but that dissipates when you stop and think about why things are the way they are. (It's possible I misread your comment and we agree.)
- lalaland1125 8y ago
  This analogy to "storing information" in the digits in pi is simply incorrect. The reason why it's incorrect is that in order to "store information", your access key must by definition be smaller than the data you are storing. This is not the case for "hiding" things in the digits of pi. In general, the index offset needed to find something will have more bits than the target information. This is clearly not the case for storing information in a blockchain as you only need a small index to find the transaction.
- msla 8y ago
  > Remember that every imaginable image is also somewhere in the digits of pi. This isn't known for sure. It depends on the digits of pi being normally distributed, which hasn't been proven.

decentralised 8y ago

This is old news. https://www.dailydot.com/business/bitcoin-child-porn-transaction-code/ https://www.dailydot.com/business/bitcoin-child-porn-transac... (2013) https://news.bitcoin.com/no-isnt-child-porn-bitcoin-blockchain/ https://news.bitcoin.com/no-isnt-child-porn-bitcoin-blockcha... https://www.wired.com/story/why-porn-on-the-blockchain-wont-doom-bitcoin/ https://www.wired.com/story/why-porn-on-the-blockchain-wont-...

miguelrochefort 8y ago

This is why data regulation will never work. GDPR and Copyrights included. Nothing can be done about it, short of banning blockchains.

bluewavescrash 8y ago

How do chains which value absolute immutability deal with this? Such as Ethereum Classic.

gsich 8y ago
They don't.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
2019ideas 8y ago
Or... you know... Bitcoin....

Proven 8y ago

Just FYI, on reddit they call this type of post a sxxxpost, and rightly so. What would actually be interesting is if somebody received a gag order and shared the info via OP_RETURN in direct violation of the order. And if the news wasn't years old.

shiado 8y ago

Given any arbitrary stored sequence of bytes, one can always devise an algorithm which converts those bytes into other meaningful sequences of bytes. This is interesting because it would appear that the liability of possessing CP on the blockchain is dependent on the ease of converting those bytes into a meaningful sequences of bytes of an image file, but where does it stop? Do the bytes have to be a raw sequence of exact image bytes stored contiguously? Does simply flipping the bits make the byte sequence lose enough 'meaning' to get rid of liability? If one requires the bytes alone to have the 'meaning', then what about image compression and the associated algorithms? There are some heavy-duty thought experiments with this type of problem that the courts are probably ill-equipped to address.

t0astbread 8y ago

I have multiple questions. > In addition, Money Button has banned the user that uploaded the material. > It has also put in place filtering systems to spot when anyone tries to upload similar content. > "We have all the information we need to track down criminals and prosecute them." Doesn't blockchain technology exist to prevent censorship and provide anonymity (in terms of not being able to link transactions to a real life identity)? So why would anyone want to use a client that collects and stores this kind of information about them? Doesn't it (almost) completely erase the point of having a blockchain in the first place? And how is this case handled now? Money Button said they forwarded the identity of the uploader to the authorities but is anyone gonna do anything about the problematic data?