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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 pro

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.
  - edent 5y ago
    Here are some messages which were stored in the Bitcoin blockchain http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photographs.html http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photo... There are JPGs, ASCII art, PDFs, religious messages, firmware keys, "illegal" prime numbers and all sorts. Is there anything worse than that? There are certainly some GPG encoded files in there. Perhaps someone is planning on shorting Bitcoin and is waiting to announce something so evil is stored that possession of the chain becomes a criminal offence is most countries.
    - Syonyk 5y ago
      I'm certainly aware non-transactional data is stored in the blockchain, I've linked a list of it elsewhere in this post. However, the specific claim of CP remains, as far as I'm aware, entirely hypothetical. And I'm at least not aware of any legal precedent that says the possession of random data, of which you don't have the keys, and don't have any reason to know the content of it, is illegal.
      - anon9001 5y ago
        No, it's not hypothetical, there's a handful of those images embedded into bitcoin forever. I found this reference for you: https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf See under "Illegal and Condemned Content": > Bitcoin’s blockchain contains at least eight files with sexual content. While five files only show, describe, or link to mildly pornographic content, we consider the remaining three instances objectionable for almost all jurisdictions: Two of them are backups of link lists to child pornography, containing 274 links to websites, 142 of which refer to Tor hidden services. The remaining instance is 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 (due to ethical concerns we refrain from providing a citation)." I'm sure if you really put your mind to it, you could find and recover the images, but then you'd just have illegal content and that's not very useful, so why dig for it?
mw888 5y ago
Any blockchain which universally stores media forever puts itself in the category “economically unfeasible/unsustainable.” People pay for that storage and the large and distinct nature of media makes it easy to single out prune. Worst case scenario I replace that block with illegal media with its original block header and no data. The cost to sustain an illegal media attack such that consecutive blocks contain such data is unsustainable and far easier to ameliorate than a 51% attack. According to this $76k per gigabyte on Eth. https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/872/what-is-the-cost-to-store-1kb-10kb-100kb-worth-of-data-into-the-ethereum-block https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/872/what-is-the...
- Grimburger 5y ago
  > Worst case scenario I replace that block with illegal media with its original block header and no data How do you alter a block without altering the headers of every other block afterwards? Unless you are capable of second pre-image attacks on modern cryptographic hashes that's simply not possible. What you have is a database, not a blockchain.
  - nemo1618 5y ago
    You can release a hardfork, such that all participants agree to treat the offending block as a special case. No different from the Ethereum DAO fiasco.
    - capitalsigma 5y ago
      Saying "just hard fork it" is kind of admitting defeat, no?
      - nemo1618 5y ago
        Yes, personally I would not recommend this approach, just wanted to clarify how such a thing could be achieved.
    - webmaven 5y ago
disruptalot 5y ago
I'm not aware of any instances of this but the solution is pretty simple. It's not dis similar at all to the current web. At the end of the day, any node that faces the public is a web server that is serving content, whether it's backed by a Blockchain or not. If it transmits a mentioned "illegal content" then it must cease to do so just like any other web server. What is the practical solution? Clean nodes. If such web server is in a jurisdiction of said illegal content, it must run a clean node that specifically filters such content to the web. This technology exists today, it's called "moderation", it's just that the backend is a MySQL database, not a blockchain.
- marstall 5y ago
  if Facebook can't figure out moderation with its billions, can blockchain though?
PretzelPirate 5y ago
Ethereum is looking at the idea that nodes don’t need to store all the state and can prune historic data after a certain amount of time. They won’t even need to store the entire current state of the chain. If someone wants to access resources that were pruned (ex: call an old contract), they will submit the state to the network along with a proof that the data is correct. In this model, you’d have to store the illegal content yourself in order to ‘rehydrate’ it into the current state of Ethereum.
- crazypython 5y ago
  Interesting, how would the proofs be created?

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.
- edent 5y ago
  Here are some messages which were stored in the Bitcoin blockchain http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photographs.html http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photo... There are JPGs, ASCII art, PDFs, religious messages, firmware keys, "illegal" prime numbers and all sorts. Is there anything worse than that? There are certainly some GPG encoded files in there. Perhaps someone is planning on shorting Bitcoin and is waiting to announce something so evil is stored that possession of the chain becomes a criminal offence is most countries.
  - Syonyk 5y ago
    I'm certainly aware non-transactional data is stored in the blockchain, I've linked a list of it elsewhere in this post. However, the specific claim of CP remains, as far as I'm aware, entirely hypothetical. And I'm at least not aware of any legal precedent that says the possession of random data, of which you don't have the keys, and don't have any reason to know the content of it, is illegal.
    - anon9001 5y ago
      No, it's not hypothetical, there's a handful of those images embedded into bitcoin forever. I found this reference for you: https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf See under "Illegal and Condemned Content": > Bitcoin’s blockchain contains at least eight files with sexual content. While five files only show, describe, or link to mildly pornographic content, we consider the remaining three instances objectionable for almost all jurisdictions: Two of them are backups of link lists to child pornography, containing 274 links to websites, 142 of which refer to Tor hidden services. The remaining instance is 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 (due to ethical concerns we refrain from providing a citation)." I'm sure if you really put your mind to it, you could find and recover the images, but then you'd just have illegal content and that's not very useful, so why dig for it?

mw888 5y ago

Any blockchain which universally stores media forever puts itself in the category “economically unfeasible/unsustainable.” People pay for that storage and the large and distinct nature of media makes it easy to single out prune. Worst case scenario I replace that block with illegal media with its original block header and no data. The cost to sustain an illegal media attack such that consecutive blocks contain such data is unsustainable and far easier to ameliorate than a 51% attack. According to this $76k per gigabyte on Eth. https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/872/what-is-the-cost-to-store-1kb-10kb-100kb-worth-of-data-into-the-ethereum-block https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/872/what-is-the...

Grimburger 5y ago
> Worst case scenario I replace that block with illegal media with its original block header and no data How do you alter a block without altering the headers of every other block afterwards? Unless you are capable of second pre-image attacks on modern cryptographic hashes that's simply not possible. What you have is a database, not a blockchain.
- nemo1618 5y ago
  You can release a hardfork, such that all participants agree to treat the offending block as a special case. No different from the Ethereum DAO fiasco.
  - capitalsigma 5y ago
    Saying "just hard fork it" is kind of admitting defeat, no?
    - nemo1618 5y ago
      Yes, personally I would not recommend this approach, just wanted to clarify how such a thing could be achieved.
  - webmaven 5y ago

disruptalot 5y ago

I'm not aware of any instances of this but the solution is pretty simple. It's not dis similar at all to the current web. At the end of the day, any node that faces the public is a web server that is serving content, whether it's backed by a Blockchain or not. If it transmits a mentioned "illegal content" then it must cease to do so just like any other web server. What is the practical solution? Clean nodes. If such web server is in a jurisdiction of said illegal content, it must run a clean node that specifically filters such content to the web. This technology exists today, it's called "moderation", it's just that the backend is a MySQL database, not a blockchain.

marstall 5y ago
if Facebook can't figure out moderation with its billions, can blockchain though?

PretzelPirate 5y ago

Ethereum is looking at the idea that nodes don’t need to store all the state and can prune historic data after a certain amount of time. They won’t even need to store the entire current state of the chain. If someone wants to access resources that were pruned (ex: call an old contract), they will submit the state to the network along with a proof that the data is correct. In this model, you’d have to store the illegal content yourself in order to ‘rehydrate’ it into the current state of Ethereum.

crazypython 5y ago
Interesting, how would the proofs be created?