5 ms·

Someone can send you illegal material through the regular snail mail and call the cops as soon as the mail is delivered. Is this really that different?

by Joeri 5y ago

jeroenhd 5y ago
I don't have to pay ethereum gas to hand the proof over to the police or to burn it if they don't care. The mail system also doesn't keep a public, permanent record of all things mailed to me that any political opponents might use to imply things. There are also countries where you don't want to let the police know you own crypto because of laws against alternative currencies. Real world comparisons don't really work well with public blockchains.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  Well, if you don't have a wallet then you can't receive it, and if you have a wallet, you're suspect anyway ?
berkut 5y ago
I personally wouldn't want to put possible key disclosure laws to the test in this situation. With post mail I'd imagine that scenario is somewhat timing-critical, whereas I'm not sure how feasible it is to delete things if they are in the blockchain (consensus for deletion? How does that work?) and the police seize all the computers in your house.
samatman 5y ago
That's the point of this sort of (hypothetical?) attack: poor Bob now has a poison envelope on his private key, he has something which roughly constitutes 'ownership' of illegal bits. Does our legal structure support immediately transferring it to a null wallet as a disclaimer of ownership? Bob doesn't want to be the one to make that case law. Nor does he want to hand over his private key, or clean his wallet out of everything but the evil image and then hand over his private key. Basically there are no good options, although burning the offending data by sending it to /dev/null should emerge as a valid defense. Will it?
- jakear 5y ago
  "I swear officer, the only proof I have of ever being sent those images is this folder filled with infinitely detailed top-down photographs of each one of them lying face-up in my trash can""
  - samatman 5y ago
    A tidy summary of the issue, that. But hey, if it was a Bored Cryptokitty, then Bob can't sell it and no one can buy it anymore, so clearly, he doesn't own it. The same principle should apply to evil bits, the real kicker being that the whole rigamarole is now written to a shared database whose, er, immutability is part of the product on offer. Man, the Twenties are gonna be lit.
    - jakear 5y ago
      The NFT principle only applies when content consumers value maintaining a chain of ownership to content authors. In cases where a clear chain of provenance is more of a liability than an asset, it's probably more desirable to forge a new copy for resale and shred the original. I suspect this is perhaps a part of why OpenSea maintains a lens over all wallet content requests... the impact of a mass mailing of evil bits to wallets would be devastating to the platform, perhaps to the entire crypto ecosystem. Any corporation who wants to be seen as legitimate must have the capability to keep evil bits out of users eyes.

Someone can send you illegal material through the regular snail mail and call the cops as soon as the mail is delivered. Is this really that different?

by Joeri 5y ago

Someone can send you illegal material through the regular snail mail and call the cops as soon as the mail is delivered. Is this really that different?

jeroenhd 5y ago

I don't have to pay ethereum gas to hand the proof over to the police or to burn it if they don't care. The mail system also doesn't keep a public, permanent record of all things mailed to me that any political opponents might use to imply things. There are also countries where you don't want to let the police know you own crypto because of laws against alternative currencies. Real world comparisons don't really work well with public blockchains.

BlueTemplar 5y ago
Well, if you don't have a wallet then you can't receive it, and if you have a wallet, you're suspect anyway ?

berkut 5y ago

I personally wouldn't want to put possible key disclosure laws to the test in this situation. With post mail I'd imagine that scenario is somewhat timing-critical, whereas I'm not sure how feasible it is to delete things if they are in the blockchain (consensus for deletion? How does that work?) and the police seize all the computers in your house.

samatman 5y ago

That's the point of this sort of (hypothetical?) attack: poor Bob now has a poison envelope on his private key, he has something which roughly constitutes 'ownership' of illegal bits. Does our legal structure support immediately transferring it to a null wallet as a disclaimer of ownership? Bob doesn't want to be the one to make that case law. Nor does he want to hand over his private key, or clean his wallet out of everything but the evil image and then hand over his private key. Basically there are no good options, although burning the offending data by sending it to /dev/null should emerge as a valid defense. Will it?

jakear 5y ago
"I swear officer, the only proof I have of ever being sent those images is this folder filled with infinitely detailed top-down photographs of each one of them lying face-up in my trash can""
- samatman 5y ago
  A tidy summary of the issue, that. But hey, if it was a Bored Cryptokitty, then Bob can't sell it and no one can buy it anymore, so clearly, he doesn't own it. The same principle should apply to evil bits, the real kicker being that the whole rigamarole is now written to a shared database whose, er, immutability is part of the product on offer. Man, the Twenties are gonna be lit.
  - jakear 5y ago
    The NFT principle only applies when content consumers value maintaining a chain of ownership to content authors. In cases where a clear chain of provenance is more of a liability than an asset, it's probably more desirable to forge a new copy for resale and shred the original. I suspect this is perhaps a part of why OpenSea maintains a lens over all wallet content requests... the impact of a mass mailing of evil bits to wallets would be devastating to the platform, perhaps to the entire crypto ecosystem. Any corporation who wants to be seen as legitimate must have the capability to keep evil bits out of users eyes.