12 ms·

Abuse and Harassment on the Blockchain

102 points by ilamont 5y ago

pontifier 5y ago
Haha, made great use of the NEM Blockchain. Sent "f*_this_s*coin_to_the_ground" to everyone that had more than about $10 worth of NEM. It was highly satisfying to use their own network to message people about the dishonesty of the developers after they tried to censor me on every other platform.
randomhodler84 5y ago
It would be rad if Molly wrote about privacy cryptocurrencies like Monero and Zcash and how these can enable better protections for at risk folks. The argument that transparency can lead to coercion can be quite convincing — privacy technologies can give power to victims.
- rideontime 5y ago
  Monero and Zcash have been around for a while. Have they worked?
  - totony 5y ago
    How would you know if they worked? By their virtue they are used for privacy
  - syntheweave 5y ago
    There's a very large unclaimed bounty for breaking Monero's privacy. And those two are the tip of the iceberg. Check out Dero for one that's doing smart contracts with homomorphic encryption. The future of privacy coins, based on these examples, is simply that they work, and will do so as long as the encryption mechanisms do. So we are presented with a question of which applications benefit from public vs private chains.
    - X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
      Another really interesting one is mina which is looking to do a constant sized state with smart contract abilities.
    - randomhodler84 5y ago
      Dero is the worst name. What were they thinking. Dero/Derro is Australian slang for derelict, poor. It sounds cheap and nasty. If Mina can rebrand from Corda, (much better name) Dero should think about it too.
  - X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
    > Have they worked? By what metric?
    - rideontime 5y ago
      The GP’s claim. Have they given power back to victims?
  - notriddle 5y ago
    Most “Bitcoin” transactions happen off-chain, at sites like Coinbase. And they’re mostly price speculation. Monero and Zcash probably do more actual business than non-private chains do. It’s all drugs and ransomeware, but it’s actually being used as money.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      I've gotten paid in XMR for some quick anonymous coding. It was a great experience. I wish everybody did it.
    - rideontime 5y ago
      But are they actually giving power to victims?
  - xvector 5y ago
    Yes? Monero, at least, has definitely worked and it's the currency of choice for anyone that wants privacy. There's no better endorsement for Monero than the unclaimed bounty to crack its privacy and its usage by cybercriminals. Monero is used more in "the real world" than any other cryptocurrency.
    - rideontime 5y ago
      But have they given power back to victims?
      - xvector 5y ago
        What does this even mean?
        rideontime 5y ago
        I don't know, ask this guy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30050367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30050367 I don't doubt that anonymous transactions are possible, I want to know if they're actually accomplishing what this person is claiming. They've had plenty of time to do so.
        xvector 5y ago
        I think it's unquestionable that privacy is generally helpful to victims (or rather, the victimized.) I think what he might be referring to in particular is that the traditional blockchain and even financial system at large is incapable of protecting at-risk individuals (eg activists), as the former is subject to chain analysis and the latter is subject to the whims of whichever regime has taken power.
        rideontime 5y ago
        My point is that people keep saying that crypto will do things when it has in fact had plenty of time to do those things.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    There's at least some evidence that Monero is resistant to US government sanctions. They tried to sanction a wallet and ended up sanctioning a transaction hash. https://www.treasury.gov/ofac/downloads/sdnlist.txt https://www.treasury.gov/ofac/downloads/sdnlist.txt > Digital Currency Address - XMR 5be5543ff73456ab9f2d207887e2af87322c651ea1a873c5b25b7ffae456c320; https://localmonero.co/blocks/search/5be5543ff73456ab9f2d207887e2af87322c651ea1a873c5b25b7ffae456c320 https://localmonero.co/blocks/search/5be5543ff73456ab9f2d207...
ilamont 5y ago
If someone stores revenge porn or child sexual abuse material on a blockchain, it is there forever and cannot be removed. What, if any, solutions have been proposed for such situations? Have there been any lawsuits or proposed legislation to combat such crimes?
- Gigachad 5y ago
  You can’t store the actual content on the chain. At least not bitcoin. You can only really store the hash of it.
  - Syonyk 5y ago
    Not really true - it's no longer affordable to do so, but there's all sorts of non-transactional content on the Bitcoin blockchain: https://cirosantilli.com/cool-data-embedded-in-the-bitcoin-blockchain https://cirosantilli.com/cool-data-embedded-in-the-bitcoin-b...
    - cirosantilli 5y ago
      Yup, you can just embed the data in the hashes (for which you don't have the corresponding private key, and therefore cannot claim back funds), related: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/29554/explanation-of-what-an-op-return-transaction-looks-like/101451#101451 https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/29554/explanatio...
- lawn 5y ago
  What if I told you that PI contains child porn?
  - Syonyk 5y ago
    I've heard this claim made for many years now about the Bitcoin blockchain data blocks, but usually in the sort of whispered tones in quiet backwaters places on the internet that deal substantially in half-truths, and that which never happened but always is, and such. As there are a lot of people who are quite opposed to Bitcoin/PoW/blockchain/etc, I assume if it was true, someone would have come up with some indisputable, solid evidence for it, and it would make the tech news rounds for quite some time (there are enough anti-Bitcoin writers and commenters that such a thing would never die, and would be brought up with some links to the evidence in literally every article written about Bitcoin). As that's not happened, I remain inclined to treat it as rumors and "But if you use this OTP you can get the following out!" sort of trickery.
mnd999 5y ago
If I store the decryption key to some blu-ray on chain, presumably that makes the chain illegal in the USA?
- overcast 5y ago
  diabolical!
- argvargc 5y ago
  By the same, uh, token, could you find a bunch of commits from a large github repo that each form successive parts of the key, post an issue referencing them, and then make that repo - or even all github - illegal in the USA? If Bitcoin's primary design and purpose to disseminate bluray decryption keys, and provide unfettered access to them to anybody and everybody, and advertise it as such, there may be some kind of an argument to be made. But as it's not, and there are hoops to jump through, doesn't it make about as much sense as trying to make malls and permanent markers illegal, because someone wrote a bluray decryption key under a mall toilets cistern lid?
  - Beltalowda 5y ago
    But you can remove that Blu-Ray decryption key from the toilets cistern lid. With the blockchain, that is much harder (or impossible?)
    - argvargc 5y ago
      Sort of. If someone figures out the right UV lamp will reveal remnants of the marker pen, you'll have to make UV lamps illegal. Or if someone took a photo of the key before it was erased and uploaded it, you'll have to make cameras and the internet illegal. In our present reality, almost every piece of information - with sufficient intent - can effectively become immutable, owing to our interconnectivity and resourcefulness. And as I understand it this is the part that matters legally - the law is concerned with that intent. I often see people claiming an immutable blockchain and all of its users are potentially in violation of the law because someone put something on it that's illegal and therefore everyone around the world with an unwitting copy of that information is breaking the law. But is that how the law works? (Well, when it's working - which it doesn't always, but in general.) In this example of someone putting illegal content on the Bitcoin blockchain, the system and its users could be more rightly seen as victims of the crime. Just as much as the mall owner is a victim of an act of vandalism, or the github repo's owner. None of these parties had the intent to host this information. However if a particular blockchain was specifically created and marketed as a place to host and get bluray keys, and all peers and miners hosting copies of it clearly knew that, then they are showing intent to break the law and would be treated differently. Now IANAL, and neither is this a perfect metric and it becomes a grey area at times, but as I understand it, this question of intent is fundamental to law and how it's enforced in the real world. We can think of countless examples of how doing anything else would result in continual and repeated injustices. Turning an apartment buildings worth of people into criminals would be as simple as putting a piece of paper with a decryption key on it into everyones letterbox. No. They're the victims of unsolicited mail. It doesn't mean all of them and the postal system should be considered illegal, even if they unwittingly kept the letter in a stack with other junk mail in their room.
tinalumfoil 5y ago
Banks and data harvesters are not good guys. The problem with blockchains is, unlike banks, they let people send abusive messages to me? Every time i wade through my Gmail spam folder I see dozens of sexually explicit messages. Every time I open my phone there’s notifications I dont want that I never asked to receive from, among other things, my bank. I’ve had money taken out of my bank account, charged to my credit cards from services that couldn’t take a, “No I don’t remember subscribing to you and I don’t want your services.” I get physical mail for loans I don’t need at rates, stated in misleading ways, that nobody should take. I didn’t ask for these. I don’t think blockchains accomplish what they’re supposed to, but you’re telling me the problem with them is they don’t respect and privacy and allow people to send me unwanted messages? Compared to the status quo? What world do you live in?
- boffinism 5y ago
  In the article she specifically talks about how blockchains are a godsend for data harvesters. I think it's disingenuous to pick out one of her criticisms, ignore the rest and say "that criticism by itself isn't as bad as the alternative".
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    The author is not even wrong. Public transparent blockchains are a disaster for privacy. Bitcoin is even worse for privacy than the average credit card since the personal information is out there for everyone to see. It gets to the point it destroys bitcoin's fungibility since you can tell each coin apart from their transaction history. This isn't am inherent problem with blockchains though. Privacy blockchains exist. Monero transactions don't reveal much. There's no way to tell who's sending the money, who's receiving it or even how much.
    - olalonde 5y ago
      How do you reconcile this idea with the fact that Bitcoin seems quite popular among Internet fraudsters and scammers (e.g. ransomware)? Or that most Bitcoin thieves are never caught? "Bitcoin is even worse for privacy than the average credit card" is a huge overstatement. You really can't infer that much from looking at the blockchain, especially when there is no address re-use. Even less when CoinJoin is used. You can make some probabilistic guesses at best. Ross Ulbricht, aka "Dread Pirate Roberts", was using Bitcoin extensively and never got identified through the blockchain (he got caught due to a Tor misconfiguration). I'm pretty sure he would have been identified pretty quickly if he had used a credit card merchant account.
baggy_trough 5y ago
taurusnoises 5y ago
- yob22 5y ago
- tmnvix 5y ago
  > ...then you should be listening and not responding. I think this is a bit much. Considered responses - even critiques - should always be welcome.
  - taurusnoises 5y ago
    - fleddr 5y ago
      No one needs yours either.
      - taurusnoises 5y ago
        good one
- atypicaluser 5y ago
  While I won't critique the article, I will critique this response: why bother being on a discussion board if you're not going to discuss or if you're going to ban discussion? You post to a discussion board, you risk discussion, even if contributors to the discussion don't fit your idea of the model participant.
  - taurusnoises 5y ago
    No one is "banning" anyone. When people discuss abuse, your best move is to listen, get informed, listen and get informed. "Critique" is literally the least useful response.
nemo1618 5y ago
Weird to premise an article on the assertion that blockchain devs suffer from a lack of...adversarial thinking? "How will this technology be used to harass and abuse people?" is a question that security engineers ask every single day! > there is very little privacy available once your crypto wallet address is known, because every transaction is publicly visible, and attempts to obscure them often easily unobscured with chain analysis tools Any good crypto wallet will generate a distinct address for each transaction. (Granted, chain analysis could help correlate addresses, but doing so requires a vastly larger effort and success is not guaranteed.) > immutable social network content is horrifying given what people post themselves. Imagine if the cringy posts by a twelve-year-old were guaranteed to be available in perpetuity as soon as they were saved Once your data is on my machine, it is out of your hands forever. This is a fundamental principle, and the alternative is surely more dystopian. Norms must change to accommodate what is a technological fact; the reason they haven't changed yet is because most social technology is still centralized. But people already understand that you can't un-send an email, for example. Why should the rest of the internet be different?
- marstall 5y ago
  > Any good crypto wallet will generate a distinct address for each transaction. From what I know, the would require an extra transaction, and additional fees? At least on ETH. Correct me if I'm wrong.
  - xvector 5y ago
    ethereum, yes, bitcoin, no if you need privacy just use Monero
  - gregors 5y ago
    Hierarchical Deterministic (HD) wallets exist for Eth. https://wolovim.medium.com/ethereum-201-hd-wallets-11d0c93c87f7 https://wolovim.medium.com/ethereum-201-hd-wallets-11d0c93c8...
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  > Once your data is on my machine, it is out of your hands forever. The world isn't quite that apodictic. While the worst case may not change, its likelihood can. Information has always had a half-life that people had a general idea of, and that they considered in their decision-making. An effort specifically aimed at creating immutable, perpetual records will hurt both the people who fail to adjust, who will more likely see damaging old stuff coming up than expected, as well as the people who do change their habits, who are forced to restrict their openness and thereby lose whatever utility they used to derive from the previous, more liberal ability to share content. The mechanism is identical to a change from traffic laws being enforced by cops, where some slack in the system was unavoidable, expected, and sometimes compensated for with higher fines (where the risk of being caught is too low), to some automated system where every single traffic violation is recorded and fined.
edent 5y ago
For those that don't get how unwanted financial messages can be a problem, here's a thread from last year about blocking incoming transactions to UK bank accounts. https://www.reddit.com/r/UKPersonalFinance/comments/kkgrsj/can_you_block_someone_sending_you_money/ https://www.reddit.com/r/UKPersonalFinance/comments/kkgrsj/c... It's somewhat common in the UK for people to send each other a couple of pennies, along with a short message, via banking apps. Some banks will block senders on request. As banks have to perform KYC checks, it's also possible to report people for harassment to the police. I'm not sure how unregulated cryptocoins can do that. I'm sure you can tell a wallet to ignore any transactions from a specific address - but there's no way to prevent those transactions actually being committed to the chain.
xiphias2 5y ago
So much text with so little content. Not talking about taproot upgrade, using discrete log contracts instead of hash time lock contracts, signature aggregation, half signature aggregation, coinjoin, and a lot of technologies that take many years of research and development to improve privacy.
- breadbreadbread 5y ago
  personally i think its a problem that a technology that is supposed to be the "future" requires so much institutional knowledge to even begin to discuss privacy improvements. If you want go write your own article that explains these technologies to the average twitter user and see how long it ends up being.
  - xiphias2 5y ago
    I don't disagree with you at all. That's why it's the future, not the present. I started buying Bitcoins when there were no hardware wallets, and I know many people who lost them in different ways (me too). Building up a debit based system when our current financial system is credit based is super hard and risky for the early investors. You can just wait until most bugs get fixed and these features get implemented in the next 10 years. You'll have less upside potential, but another mature system to choose from.
ardme 5y ago
It's a question of whether or not you believe freedom of speech is worth the risk somebody somewhere will say something you don't like. At one point people seemed to believe this worth the risk and freedom of speech was good. Now, little by little people are attacking this. Choose safety over freedom and you will be giving your freedom to someone you have no control over, but now they have the freedom to control you.
disruptalot 5y ago
The entire premise of the article is flawed. Blockchains aren't at all as "take it or leave it" as it's being portrayed as. In fact, the exact opposite compared to traditional web services. Yes you can send a token or NFT to anyone on the chain, yes as far as the data layer is concerned that is "immutable". That however does not prevent you as a user to forgo your access/freedom to an entity that knows best for you, just like we do everyday in traditional web services, social media, banking institutions etc. What does that look like? The underlying data layer (the blockchain) is public and open source. A "moderation" company can build their own middleware that filters data, throws out spam/harassment etc. Then, your node or wallet consumes and interacts with this middleware instead of the base layer. Now you have successfully incorporated abuse/harassment moderation without having to worry about the blockchain at all. If someone sends you something undesirable, you never see or interact with it. At the end of the day, blockchains give you *the option* to have your freedom, they do not force it upon you. The same can't be said about the traditional tech.
- epolanski 5y ago
  So this is the modern narrative of "decentralization"? Just rely on trusted middlewares? What's the utility of the trustless blockchain behind it. Moreover, middleware or not, it's still on the chain and accessible to everyone.
  - breadbreadbread 5y ago
    by offloading the responsibility of trust and accessibility onto middleware, blockchain has successfully reinvented the bank!
  - disruptalot 5y ago
    No this isn't the modern narrative, it's the stop gap solution for individuals that don't have the capacity to adapt to a new paradigm or have particular concerns (e.g. abuse) The utility is still right there for whoever wants to take advantage of it, but they still have the option to forgo part or all of the trustless nature. It doesn't matter if the "offending data" is sitting on a computer somewhere (that's all a blockchain is) what matters if it's accessible and as I mentioned, it's up to the blockchain nodes to transmit it or a user to consume it. Both of which can be solved if needed with middleware.
isx726552 5y ago
> Apple apparently didn’t put much thought into how its AirTag location tracking discs could be misused by stalkers and domestic abusers. I’d say this is not really accurate. Apple chose to put detection and warnings in place for when an AirTag is potentially moving with someone without their knowledge, and they had these in place from day 1. Sure, they could have done a better job (especially when it comes to other platforms like Android, which have taken time for Apple to get caught up on), but it’s a stretch to say they didn’t put thought into it. If anything, they could have kept much more quiet about it rather than put tools into place which help detect abuse, but also raise awareness and call attention to it. They made a choice, and the right one at that. Meanwhile there are plenty of electronic devices available which can be used for stalking purposes and can be bought very cheaply on Amazon (no, I won’t link to any) and give no such warnings from any apps when they are unexpectedly traveling with someone. These are much cheaper and much harder to detect. If someone is genuinely concerned about such abuse of technology that should be equally called out along with Apple. Of course that might not get as much attention as going after a visible company like Apple, but it nevertheless deserves the same level of concern.
- xpressvideoz 5y ago
  Those stalking devices might be harder to detect, but are they as effective as AirTag? IIRC the innovation behind AirTag is that they don't require network connectivity. The devices you mentioned might require cellular network or WiFi, and the former is linked to the criminal's identity and the latter is not available everywhere.
  - nomel 5y ago
    AirTags do require network activity for the location to be make its way back to your phone, with that network activity provided by another Apple device, rather than the tag itself. And, each AirTag must be linked to an Apple account. If you find an AirTag, hold your phone near and it will give you the full serial number and the last four digits of the phone number associated with it. I’m sure Apple has all sorts of additional information, related to that account, that could be given to the authorities.
- 5y ago
marstall 5y ago
Hey hacker news, let's acknowledge this is a really important and well-thought out exposé of a serious flaw in blockchain (on par with Maxie Marlinspike's recent dive into web3 IMHO) and show our colors by sending to the top.
- rvz 5y ago
  As for Moxie, it seems that the authors criticism also heavily applies to both Signal and MobileCoin. I don’t think the author would like to know how the abuse of both projects by ‘criminals’ is happening; even worse when MobileCoin is a privacy coin like Monero. Good luck tracing the sender. Like the internet, email and now blockchain, the road to hell has been paved with good intentions, until the criminals came along abusing Signal and MobileCoin.
mastazi 5y ago
I am critical of certain aspects of crypto currencies and I'm certainly not a "crypto fanboy", but > Some cryptocurrency enthusiasts envision a world where cryptocurrencies have replaced dollars and euros (which they refer to as “fiat”; I prefer the term “real money”) if the author wanted to get their point across, maybe they could have avoided the snarky comment in the article's introduction? Whenever I read this type of statement, there is a switch in my brain that flips and goes "OK what you're going to read next is probably biased". At least in my personal experience, this style of writing ends up diluting the validity of any other statement within the article.
- cinntaile 5y ago
  It's an advantage to know someone's agenda so I consider it a good thing. This author and other authors such as Stephen Diehl are known for their negative take on cryptocurrencies and they end up here quite often. You can still read their articles while keeping their bias in mind!
- hbbio 5y ago
  The blog mostly contains anti-crypto articles. One of them: "I have instead come to believe that [crypto is] so harmful that I cannot ethically continue to ignore them, and must instead do my best to educate and advocate against their wider adoption. I am picking my battles, and this is one of them."
hrdwdmrbl 5y ago
Check out https://www.proofofhumanity.id/ https://www.proofofhumanity.id/ For Sybil resistance on Ethereum
magicjosh 5y ago
This concern about harassing messages is particularly relevant as data aggregator Etherscan just announced their new messaging feature "Blockscan Chat". I'm unclear on how it works but it's the first time I've seen such accessible tools for blockchain users to message eachother: https://chat.blockscan.com/start https://chat.blockscan.com/start That said, even in this beta there's an easy to reach option to "Block user". Nice work Etherscan!
- Stevvo 5y ago
  On how that chat works; you sign a message to Blockscan's server to prove ownership of your key, then it's just un-ecrpyted chat with messages stored Blockscan's server and you public key as your username.
  - magicjosh 5y ago
    Ah, got a source? Curious to hear more about this. Sounds kinda meh.
    - Stevvo 5y ago
      The source is "view source".
satisfice 5y ago
As soon as I read about how web3 will set us free from the tyranny of centralized corporate or governmental power, I mentally add “…so that highly motivated social misfits can abuse people and commit other crimes without interference.” This clarifies the purpose of web3.
magicjosh 5y ago
For those of you looking for more content by the author, her blog is solid, but this Tweet thread is a masterpiece: https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1478513207203536900 https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1478513207203536900
- jaclaz 5y ago
  Thanks, very interesting.

102 points by ilamont 5y ago

Haha, made great use of the NEM Blockchain. Sent "f*_this_s*coin_to_the_ground" to everyone that had more than about $10 worth of NEM. It was highly satisfying to use their own network to message people about the dishonesty of the developers after they tried to censor me on every other platform.

randomhodler84 5y ago

It would be rad if Molly wrote about privacy cryptocurrencies like Monero and Zcash and how these can enable better protections for at risk folks. The argument that transparency can lead to coercion can be quite convincing — privacy technologies can give power to victims.

rideontime 5y ago
Monero and Zcash have been around for a while. Have they worked?
- totony 5y ago
  How would you know if they worked? By their virtue they are used for privacy
- syntheweave 5y ago
  There's a very large unclaimed bounty for breaking Monero's privacy. And those two are the tip of the iceberg. Check out Dero for one that's doing smart contracts with homomorphic encryption. The future of privacy coins, based on these examples, is simply that they work, and will do so as long as the encryption mechanisms do. So we are presented with a question of which applications benefit from public vs private chains.
  - X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
    Another really interesting one is mina which is looking to do a constant sized state with smart contract abilities.
  - randomhodler84 5y ago
    Dero is the worst name. What were they thinking. Dero/Derro is Australian slang for derelict, poor. It sounds cheap and nasty. If Mina can rebrand from Corda, (much better name) Dero should think about it too.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
  > Have they worked? By what metric?
  - rideontime 5y ago
    The GP’s claim. Have they given power back to victims?
- notriddle 5y ago
  Most “Bitcoin” transactions happen off-chain, at sites like Coinbase. And they’re mostly price speculation. Monero and Zcash probably do more actual business than non-private chains do. It’s all drugs and ransomeware, but it’s actually being used as money.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    I've gotten paid in XMR for some quick anonymous coding. It was a great experience. I wish everybody did it.
  - rideontime 5y ago
    But are they actually giving power to victims?
- xvector 5y ago
  Yes? Monero, at least, has definitely worked and it's the currency of choice for anyone that wants privacy. There's no better endorsement for Monero than the unclaimed bounty to crack its privacy and its usage by cybercriminals. Monero is used more in "the real world" than any other cryptocurrency.
  - rideontime 5y ago
    But have they given power back to victims?
    - xvector 5y ago
      What does this even mean?
      - rideontime 5y ago
        I don't know, ask this guy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30050367 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30050367 I don't doubt that anonymous transactions are possible, I want to know if they're actually accomplishing what this person is claiming. They've had plenty of time to do so.
        xvector 5y ago
        I think it's unquestionable that privacy is generally helpful to victims (or rather, the victimized.) I think what he might be referring to in particular is that the traditional blockchain and even financial system at large is incapable of protecting at-risk individuals (eg activists), as the former is subject to chain analysis and the latter is subject to the whims of whichever regime has taken power.
        rideontime 5y ago
        My point is that people keep saying that crypto will do things when it has in fact had plenty of time to do those things.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  There's at least some evidence that Monero is resistant to US government sanctions. They tried to sanction a wallet and ended up sanctioning a transaction hash. https://www.treasury.gov/ofac/downloads/sdnlist.txt https://www.treasury.gov/ofac/downloads/sdnlist.txt > Digital Currency Address - XMR 5be5543ff73456ab9f2d207887e2af87322c651ea1a873c5b25b7ffae456c320; https://localmonero.co/blocks/search/5be5543ff73456ab9f2d207887e2af87322c651ea1a873c5b25b7ffae456c320 https://localmonero.co/blocks/search/5be5543ff73456ab9f2d207...

ilamont 5y ago

If someone stores revenge porn or child sexual abuse material on a blockchain, it is there forever and cannot be removed. What, if any, solutions have been proposed for such situations? Have there been any lawsuits or proposed legislation to combat such crimes?

Gigachad 5y ago
You can’t store the actual content on the chain. At least not bitcoin. You can only really store the hash of it.
- Syonyk 5y ago
  Not really true - it's no longer affordable to do so, but there's all sorts of non-transactional content on the Bitcoin blockchain: https://cirosantilli.com/cool-data-embedded-in-the-bitcoin-blockchain https://cirosantilli.com/cool-data-embedded-in-the-bitcoin-b...
  - cirosantilli 5y ago
    Yup, you can just embed the data in the hashes (for which you don't have the corresponding private key, and therefore cannot claim back funds), related: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/29554/explanation-of-what-an-op-return-transaction-looks-like/101451#101451 https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/29554/explanatio...
lawn 5y ago
What if I told you that PI contains child porn?
- Syonyk 5y ago
  I've heard this claim made for many years now about the Bitcoin blockchain data blocks, but usually in the sort of whispered tones in quiet backwaters places on the internet that deal substantially in half-truths, and that which never happened but always is, and such. As there are a lot of people who are quite opposed to Bitcoin/PoW/blockchain/etc, I assume if it was true, someone would have come up with some indisputable, solid evidence for it, and it would make the tech news rounds for quite some time (there are enough anti-Bitcoin writers and commenters that such a thing would never die, and would be brought up with some links to the evidence in literally every article written about Bitcoin). As that's not happened, I remain inclined to treat it as rumors and "But if you use this OTP you can get the following out!" sort of trickery.

mnd999 5y ago

If I store the decryption key to some blu-ray on chain, presumably that makes the chain illegal in the USA?

overcast 5y ago
diabolical!
argvargc 5y ago
By the same, uh, token, could you find a bunch of commits from a large github repo that each form successive parts of the key, post an issue referencing them, and then make that repo - or even all github - illegal in the USA? If Bitcoin's primary design and purpose to disseminate bluray decryption keys, and provide unfettered access to them to anybody and everybody, and advertise it as such, there may be some kind of an argument to be made. But as it's not, and there are hoops to jump through, doesn't it make about as much sense as trying to make malls and permanent markers illegal, because someone wrote a bluray decryption key under a mall toilets cistern lid?
- Beltalowda 5y ago
  But you can remove that Blu-Ray decryption key from the toilets cistern lid. With the blockchain, that is much harder (or impossible?)
  - argvargc 5y ago
    Sort of. If someone figures out the right UV lamp will reveal remnants of the marker pen, you'll have to make UV lamps illegal. Or if someone took a photo of the key before it was erased and uploaded it, you'll have to make cameras and the internet illegal. In our present reality, almost every piece of information - with sufficient intent - can effectively become immutable, owing to our interconnectivity and resourcefulness. And as I understand it this is the part that matters legally - the law is concerned with that intent. I often see people claiming an immutable blockchain and all of its users are potentially in violation of the law because someone put something on it that's illegal and therefore everyone around the world with an unwitting copy of that information is breaking the law. But is that how the law works? (Well, when it's working - which it doesn't always, but in general.) In this example of someone putting illegal content on the Bitcoin blockchain, the system and its users could be more rightly seen as victims of the crime. Just as much as the mall owner is a victim of an act of vandalism, or the github repo's owner. None of these parties had the intent to host this information. However if a particular blockchain was specifically created and marketed as a place to host and get bluray keys, and all peers and miners hosting copies of it clearly knew that, then they are showing intent to break the law and would be treated differently. Now IANAL, and neither is this a perfect metric and it becomes a grey area at times, but as I understand it, this question of intent is fundamental to law and how it's enforced in the real world. We can think of countless examples of how doing anything else would result in continual and repeated injustices. Turning an apartment buildings worth of people into criminals would be as simple as putting a piece of paper with a decryption key on it into everyones letterbox. No. They're the victims of unsolicited mail. It doesn't mean all of them and the postal system should be considered illegal, even if they unwittingly kept the letter in a stack with other junk mail in their room.

tinalumfoil 5y ago

Banks and data harvesters are not good guys. The problem with blockchains is, unlike banks, they let people send abusive messages to me? Every time i wade through my Gmail spam folder I see dozens of sexually explicit messages. Every time I open my phone there’s notifications I dont want that I never asked to receive from, among other things, my bank. I’ve had money taken out of my bank account, charged to my credit cards from services that couldn’t take a, “No I don’t remember subscribing to you and I don’t want your services.” I get physical mail for loans I don’t need at rates, stated in misleading ways, that nobody should take. I didn’t ask for these. I don’t think blockchains accomplish what they’re supposed to, but you’re telling me the problem with them is they don’t respect and privacy and allow people to send me unwanted messages? Compared to the status quo? What world do you live in?

boffinism 5y ago
In the article she specifically talks about how blockchains are a godsend for data harvesters. I think it's disingenuous to pick out one of her criticisms, ignore the rest and say "that criticism by itself isn't as bad as the alternative".
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  The author is not even wrong. Public transparent blockchains are a disaster for privacy. Bitcoin is even worse for privacy than the average credit card since the personal information is out there for everyone to see. It gets to the point it destroys bitcoin's fungibility since you can tell each coin apart from their transaction history. This isn't am inherent problem with blockchains though. Privacy blockchains exist. Monero transactions don't reveal much. There's no way to tell who's sending the money, who's receiving it or even how much.
  - olalonde 5y ago
    How do you reconcile this idea with the fact that Bitcoin seems quite popular among Internet fraudsters and scammers (e.g. ransomware)? Or that most Bitcoin thieves are never caught? "Bitcoin is even worse for privacy than the average credit card" is a huge overstatement. You really can't infer that much from looking at the blockchain, especially when there is no address re-use. Even less when CoinJoin is used. You can make some probabilistic guesses at best. Ross Ulbricht, aka "Dread Pirate Roberts", was using Bitcoin extensively and never got identified through the blockchain (he got caught due to a Tor misconfiguration). I'm pretty sure he would have been identified pretty quickly if he had used a credit card merchant account.

baggy_trough 5y ago

taurusnoises 5y ago

yob22 5y ago
tmnvix 5y ago
> ...then you should be listening and not responding. I think this is a bit much. Considered responses - even critiques - should always be welcome.
- taurusnoises 5y ago
  - fleddr 5y ago
    No one needs yours either.
    - taurusnoises 5y ago
      good one
atypicaluser 5y ago
While I won't critique the article, I will critique this response: why bother being on a discussion board if you're not going to discuss or if you're going to ban discussion? You post to a discussion board, you risk discussion, even if contributors to the discussion don't fit your idea of the model participant.
- taurusnoises 5y ago
  No one is "banning" anyone. When people discuss abuse, your best move is to listen, get informed, listen and get informed. "Critique" is literally the least useful response.

nemo1618 5y ago

Weird to premise an article on the assertion that blockchain devs suffer from a lack of...adversarial thinking? "How will this technology be used to harass and abuse people?" is a question that security engineers ask every single day! > there is very little privacy available once your crypto wallet address is known, because every transaction is publicly visible, and attempts to obscure them often easily unobscured with chain analysis tools Any good crypto wallet will generate a distinct address for each transaction. (Granted, chain analysis could help correlate addresses, but doing so requires a vastly larger effort and success is not guaranteed.) > immutable social network content is horrifying given what people post themselves. Imagine if the cringy posts by a twelve-year-old were guaranteed to be available in perpetuity as soon as they were saved Once your data is on my machine, it is out of your hands forever. This is a fundamental principle, and the alternative is surely more dystopian. Norms must change to accommodate what is a technological fact; the reason they haven't changed yet is because most social technology is still centralized. But people already understand that you can't un-send an email, for example. Why should the rest of the internet be different?

marstall 5y ago
> Any good crypto wallet will generate a distinct address for each transaction. From what I know, the would require an extra transaction, and additional fees? At least on ETH. Correct me if I'm wrong.
- xvector 5y ago
  ethereum, yes, bitcoin, no if you need privacy just use Monero
- gregors 5y ago
  Hierarchical Deterministic (HD) wallets exist for Eth. https://wolovim.medium.com/ethereum-201-hd-wallets-11d0c93c87f7 https://wolovim.medium.com/ethereum-201-hd-wallets-11d0c93c8...
KarlKemp 5y ago
> Once your data is on my machine, it is out of your hands forever. The world isn't quite that apodictic. While the worst case may not change, its likelihood can. Information has always had a half-life that people had a general idea of, and that they considered in their decision-making. An effort specifically aimed at creating immutable, perpetual records will hurt both the people who fail to adjust, who will more likely see damaging old stuff coming up than expected, as well as the people who do change their habits, who are forced to restrict their openness and thereby lose whatever utility they used to derive from the previous, more liberal ability to share content. The mechanism is identical to a change from traffic laws being enforced by cops, where some slack in the system was unavoidable, expected, and sometimes compensated for with higher fines (where the risk of being caught is too low), to some automated system where every single traffic violation is recorded and fined.

edent 5y ago

For those that don't get how unwanted financial messages can be a problem, here's a thread from last year about blocking incoming transactions to UK bank accounts. https://www.reddit.com/r/UKPersonalFinance/comments/kkgrsj/can_you_block_someone_sending_you_money/ https://www.reddit.com/r/UKPersonalFinance/comments/kkgrsj/c... It's somewhat common in the UK for people to send each other a couple of pennies, along with a short message, via banking apps. Some banks will block senders on request. As banks have to perform KYC checks, it's also possible to report people for harassment to the police. I'm not sure how unregulated cryptocoins can do that. I'm sure you can tell a wallet to ignore any transactions from a specific address - but there's no way to prevent those transactions actually being committed to the chain.

xiphias2 5y ago

So much text with so little content. Not talking about taproot upgrade, using discrete log contracts instead of hash time lock contracts, signature aggregation, half signature aggregation, coinjoin, and a lot of technologies that take many years of research and development to improve privacy.

breadbreadbread 5y ago
personally i think its a problem that a technology that is supposed to be the "future" requires so much institutional knowledge to even begin to discuss privacy improvements. If you want go write your own article that explains these technologies to the average twitter user and see how long it ends up being.
- xiphias2 5y ago
  I don't disagree with you at all. That's why it's the future, not the present. I started buying Bitcoins when there were no hardware wallets, and I know many people who lost them in different ways (me too). Building up a debit based system when our current financial system is credit based is super hard and risky for the early investors. You can just wait until most bugs get fixed and these features get implemented in the next 10 years. You'll have less upside potential, but another mature system to choose from.

ardme 5y ago

It's a question of whether or not you believe freedom of speech is worth the risk somebody somewhere will say something you don't like. At one point people seemed to believe this worth the risk and freedom of speech was good. Now, little by little people are attacking this. Choose safety over freedom and you will be giving your freedom to someone you have no control over, but now they have the freedom to control you.

disruptalot 5y ago

The entire premise of the article is flawed. Blockchains aren't at all as "take it or leave it" as it's being portrayed as. In fact, the exact opposite compared to traditional web services. Yes you can send a token or NFT to anyone on the chain, yes as far as the data layer is concerned that is "immutable". That however does not prevent you as a user to forgo your access/freedom to an entity that knows best for you, just like we do everyday in traditional web services, social media, banking institutions etc. What does that look like? The underlying data layer (the blockchain) is public and open source. A "moderation" company can build their own middleware that filters data, throws out spam/harassment etc. Then, your node or wallet consumes and interacts with this middleware instead of the base layer. Now you have successfully incorporated abuse/harassment moderation without having to worry about the blockchain at all. If someone sends you something undesirable, you never see or interact with it. At the end of the day, blockchains give you *the option* to have your freedom, they do not force it upon you. The same can't be said about the traditional tech.

epolanski 5y ago
So this is the modern narrative of "decentralization"? Just rely on trusted middlewares? What's the utility of the trustless blockchain behind it. Moreover, middleware or not, it's still on the chain and accessible to everyone.
- breadbreadbread 5y ago
  by offloading the responsibility of trust and accessibility onto middleware, blockchain has successfully reinvented the bank!
- disruptalot 5y ago
  No this isn't the modern narrative, it's the stop gap solution for individuals that don't have the capacity to adapt to a new paradigm or have particular concerns (e.g. abuse) The utility is still right there for whoever wants to take advantage of it, but they still have the option to forgo part or all of the trustless nature. It doesn't matter if the "offending data" is sitting on a computer somewhere (that's all a blockchain is) what matters if it's accessible and as I mentioned, it's up to the blockchain nodes to transmit it or a user to consume it. Both of which can be solved if needed with middleware.

isx726552 5y ago

> Apple apparently didn’t put much thought into how its AirTag location tracking discs could be misused by stalkers and domestic abusers. I’d say this is not really accurate. Apple chose to put detection and warnings in place for when an AirTag is potentially moving with someone without their knowledge, and they had these in place from day 1. Sure, they could have done a better job (especially when it comes to other platforms like Android, which have taken time for Apple to get caught up on), but it’s a stretch to say they didn’t put thought into it. If anything, they could have kept much more quiet about it rather than put tools into place which help detect abuse, but also raise awareness and call attention to it. They made a choice, and the right one at that. Meanwhile there are plenty of electronic devices available which can be used for stalking purposes and can be bought very cheaply on Amazon (no, I won’t link to any) and give no such warnings from any apps when they are unexpectedly traveling with someone. These are much cheaper and much harder to detect. If someone is genuinely concerned about such abuse of technology that should be equally called out along with Apple. Of course that might not get as much attention as going after a visible company like Apple, but it nevertheless deserves the same level of concern.

xpressvideoz 5y ago
Those stalking devices might be harder to detect, but are they as effective as AirTag? IIRC the innovation behind AirTag is that they don't require network connectivity. The devices you mentioned might require cellular network or WiFi, and the former is linked to the criminal's identity and the latter is not available everywhere.
- nomel 5y ago
  AirTags do require network activity for the location to be make its way back to your phone, with that network activity provided by another Apple device, rather than the tag itself. And, each AirTag must be linked to an Apple account. If you find an AirTag, hold your phone near and it will give you the full serial number and the last four digits of the phone number associated with it. I’m sure Apple has all sorts of additional information, related to that account, that could be given to the authorities.
5y ago

marstall 5y ago

Hey hacker news, let's acknowledge this is a really important and well-thought out exposé of a serious flaw in blockchain (on par with Maxie Marlinspike's recent dive into web3 IMHO) and show our colors by sending to the top.

rvz 5y ago
As for Moxie, it seems that the authors criticism also heavily applies to both Signal and MobileCoin. I don’t think the author would like to know how the abuse of both projects by ‘criminals’ is happening; even worse when MobileCoin is a privacy coin like Monero. Good luck tracing the sender. Like the internet, email and now blockchain, the road to hell has been paved with good intentions, until the criminals came along abusing Signal and MobileCoin.

mastazi 5y ago

I am critical of certain aspects of crypto currencies and I'm certainly not a "crypto fanboy", but > Some cryptocurrency enthusiasts envision a world where cryptocurrencies have replaced dollars and euros (which they refer to as “fiat”; I prefer the term “real money”) if the author wanted to get their point across, maybe they could have avoided the snarky comment in the article's introduction? Whenever I read this type of statement, there is a switch in my brain that flips and goes "OK what you're going to read next is probably biased". At least in my personal experience, this style of writing ends up diluting the validity of any other statement within the article.

cinntaile 5y ago
It's an advantage to know someone's agenda so I consider it a good thing. This author and other authors such as Stephen Diehl are known for their negative take on cryptocurrencies and they end up here quite often. You can still read their articles while keeping their bias in mind!
hbbio 5y ago
The blog mostly contains anti-crypto articles. One of them: "I have instead come to believe that [crypto is] so harmful that I cannot ethically continue to ignore them, and must instead do my best to educate and advocate against their wider adoption. I am picking my battles, and this is one of them."

hrdwdmrbl 5y ago

Check out https://www.proofofhumanity.id/ https://www.proofofhumanity.id/ For Sybil resistance on Ethereum

magicjosh 5y ago

This concern about harassing messages is particularly relevant as data aggregator Etherscan just announced their new messaging feature "Blockscan Chat". I'm unclear on how it works but it's the first time I've seen such accessible tools for blockchain users to message eachother: https://chat.blockscan.com/start https://chat.blockscan.com/start That said, even in this beta there's an easy to reach option to "Block user". Nice work Etherscan!

Stevvo 5y ago
On how that chat works; you sign a message to Blockscan's server to prove ownership of your key, then it's just un-ecrpyted chat with messages stored Blockscan's server and you public key as your username.
- magicjosh 5y ago
  Ah, got a source? Curious to hear more about this. Sounds kinda meh.
  - Stevvo 5y ago
    The source is "view source".

satisfice 5y ago

As soon as I read about how web3 will set us free from the tyranny of centralized corporate or governmental power, I mentally add “…so that highly motivated social misfits can abuse people and commit other crimes without interference.” This clarifies the purpose of web3.

magicjosh 5y ago

For those of you looking for more content by the author, her blog is solid, but this Tweet thread is a masterpiece: https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1478513207203536900 https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1478513207203536900

jaclaz 5y ago
Thanks, very interesting.