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My immediate thought is that this can be abused: to store revenge porn, inflammatory comments, defamation, and so on, in a way that is more "permanent" than the

My immediate thought is that this can be abused: to store revenge porn, inflammatory comments, defamation, and so on, in a way that is more "permanent" than the way this stuff is usually stored online. Is that a valid concern, or no?

gjs278 5y ago
human 5y ago
If you could store Pi (3.14159..) with all its digits on your computer, it would contain all past and future revenge porn. I wouldn’t really make anything of it but I wonder what a judge might want to do.
- deanCommie 5y ago
  That's not a good faith response. Show me the digits of pi that contain the image of Nelson Mandela that is as easy to find as the one described in this article. Show me a way to take any random arbitrary image and find it's corresponding representation in pi that is as easy as encoding that same image into the blockchain.
  - vivegi 5y ago
    I am not making any claims about digits of pi, however, one can take an arbitrary bit string (eg: an image of Nelson Mandela's representation), treat it as a number and extend its digits to generate a prime number or a perfect power. See: https://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/reso/015/10/0941-0947 https://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/reso/015/10/0941-0947 So, one could in theory create a list of primes (or perfect powers) populated them with hidden content using the aforesaid method and claim they are only a list of primes (or perfect powers).
    - deanCommie 5y ago
      Show me a way to take any random arbitrary image and do the calculation you discuss, and share the output, that is as easy as encoding that same image into the blockchain.
      - emteycz 5y ago
        https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/pifs https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/pifs
- Jasper_ 5y ago
  People throw this claim around, but note that: 1. It's only theorized that pi has this property. 2. Storing the starting index of the digit would likely be larger than any computer right now can hold, and possibly bigger than the estimated number atoms in the universe. 3. What a judge cares about is that you used the number with the intention of accessing the file, not the particular sleight of hand method by which you accessed it. If you cheekily share your favorite number that just so happens to be the starting digit index for "Limp Bizkit - Nookie.mp3", that's what the judge cares about. No need to outlaw pi, no need to outlaw numbers, it's all about intent. That's why they're called judges. They judge people and their intentions.
  - tromp 5y ago
    A number that provably contains all finite bit patterns is X = . 1 10 11 100 101 110 111 0000 0001 ... (the binary version of Champernowne's constant [1]) but the index at which any pattern occurs takes more bits to write than that pattern itself, and the same would hold (on average) for patterns in pi, assuming it actually is normal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champernowne_constant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champernowne_constant
- onpensionsterm 5y ago
  If true then the index of the data would be the file. That's called encryption.
seibelj 5y ago
I would say it’s physically impossible to restrict what an individual can do, regarding basically anything, without severe restrictions in freedom. However you can make fierce penalties for entities and organizations that promote, advertise, profit, etc. from actions which has a tendency to reduce it happening. For example it is trivially easy to film the TV at a bar, then tweet out the video of a sports game - millions do it every day. But if a company did that without the rights and earned money from it - an easy lawsuit.
- emteycz 5y ago
  Yeah, and there's the difference - putting it on a blockchain is incredibly permanent, and might not be easily attributable to a person.
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    In these cases the miners and the orgs who run the blockchains are the vulnerable parties hosting the content. I suspect it flies below the radar for enforcement mostly because offending material is basically there as a stunt rather than a place used for active proliferation. In the same way Roblox is full of IP infringement.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  The issue is that the damage here is almost irreversible - short of taking the whole blockchain down (which might be used as an excuse to do it ?). I guess that the penalties could be correspondingly high - like the difference between rendering someone temporarily unconscious versus killing them ?
pontifier 5y ago
It's an attack I've contemplated. If you started sending a whole bunch of plain text Tiananmen Square remembrance stuff you'd very quickly have China cracking down on whatever it was.
- david_allison 5y ago
  An image of tank man is already embedded in the blockchain.[0] CSAM links are there too.[1] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/rbxupy/tankman_image_on_bitcoin_blockchain/hnt2yje https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/rbxupy/tankman_ima... [1] > 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). Notably, two of the explicit images were only detected by our suspicious transaction detector, i.e., they were not inserted via known services. https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf [SFW]
  - kragen 5y ago
    Maybe this explains PRC's new hard-line anti-Bitcoin stance (over the last year).
    - TremendousJudge 5y ago
      Yeah, that's definitely it. I can't think of any other reason.
      - kragen 5y ago
        I can think of a couple.
- 5y ago
missblit 5y ago
I don't see why bitcoin nodes would be immune to DMCA takedown notices or other legal remedies. Sure it'd be a pain and (so far) not usually worth the hassle, but it'll have to come up eventually right? What's that? It's impossible to take down a block without messing up the entire blockchain? Well maybe Mr. Bitcoin should have thought of that when making the data so disturbingly entangled!
- jeppesen-io 5y ago
  A massive, multi-national takedown across the planet for 12k nodes? Thats well beyond the DMCA I can only imagine the cost to do that
  - meheleventyone 5y ago
    Would you have to do that or would putting the squeeze on nodes in jurisdictions you could reach be enough? Not complying comes with a cost so presumably they would ultimately be forced out or to convince their peers to fork.
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      extra-territorial enforcement? would you personally enjoy taking orders from China, or whoever the next global hegemon happens to be? Isn't it great to have some very remote and entirely unaccountable overlord telling you what to do, and then prosecute you criminally on a whim? Sounds like utopia.
      - herbst 5y ago
        Or just like America.
        inter_netuser 5y ago
        two wrongs dont make a right. america should stop doing that.
throwaway22032 5y ago
In the engineering sense this has already happened. I'm not sure "abused" is the correct term, though. It's an immutable data store, like IPFS with a server in a jurisdiction you don't control. It stores data. Is it "abusing" ext4 if you use it to store a movie rip?
- Traster 5y ago
  I would say it's pretty clear cut that this is abuse in a different way than ext4 because the blockchain has a format for how it stores various fields and you store data by putting different data in those fields. For example the fake addresses to which they send bitcoin to generate transactions. It's also worth thinking about how this is used in the context of leaking data. Imagine if instead of posting Jennifer Lawrence's nudes on reddit, hackers had put them on the blockchain and just told people it was there. You now have an immutable copy of those photos stuck in a billion dollar speculative asset.
  - throwaway22032 5y ago
    I agree that Bitcoin wasn't explicitly designed to store data. It was, however, designed to be uncensorable. Your second sentence there is - well, indeed. It _is_.
    - iszomer 5y ago
      Or worse, all the nuanced forms of a dead man's switch. [0] https://www.wired.com/2013/07/snowden-dead-mans-switch/ https://www.wired.com/2013/07/snowden-dead-mans-switch/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/58nn58/what_happened_with_the_julian_assange_dead_mans/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/58nn58/what_h... [2] https://sarcophagus.io/ https://sarcophagus.io/
      - throwaway22032 5y ago
        "Worse" in what way? To me that sounds beneficial. I'd do it myself if I had some blackmail on someone!
tirpen 5y ago
Yes it's a very valid concern. And you don't even have to go into porn territory, if the blockchain containans personally identifiable information, and it does, then it's probably in violation of the GDPR in the EU. Immutable data is almost never a good idea in practice.
- iszomer 5y ago
  This reminded me of Keybase where they signed and published [0] their root Merkle tree to the Bitcoin blockchain, as part of their server security mechanism. It was an ingenious idea at first until when it came to signature revocations. Even though they have the mechanism for that too, the data itself is still stored onto the blockchain forever with no "garbage collection" on deprecated data, outside of Keybase's control. [0] https://book.keybase.io/docs/server/merkle-root-in-bitcoin-blockchain https://book.keybase.io/docs/server/merkle-root-in-bitcoin-b... [1] https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_stellar_blockchain https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_stell...
usrusr 5y ago
If the article wasn't as old as it is (almost eight years), I'd take it as a given that the author deliberately omitted a whole lot of things that might put BTC in a bad light. Considering that even in 2014 the days of whole-number BTC amounting to play money had long been over, I wouldn't be surprised if there was self-censoring due to being personally invested even back then (but I wouldn't have suspected it back then)
- kens 5y ago
  I'm somewhat offended by your comment. For the record, I did not deliberately omit things that would put BTC in a bad light. I was not personally invested in Bitcoin (beyond a dollar or so for experiments). I wrote plenty of things negative about Bitcoin, enough to be disliked by part of the community.

gjs278 5y ago

human 5y ago

If you could store Pi (3.14159..) with all its digits on your computer, it would contain all past and future revenge porn. I wouldn’t really make anything of it but I wonder what a judge might want to do.

deanCommie 5y ago
That's not a good faith response. Show me the digits of pi that contain the image of Nelson Mandela that is as easy to find as the one described in this article. Show me a way to take any random arbitrary image and find it's corresponding representation in pi that is as easy as encoding that same image into the blockchain.
- vivegi 5y ago
  I am not making any claims about digits of pi, however, one can take an arbitrary bit string (eg: an image of Nelson Mandela's representation), treat it as a number and extend its digits to generate a prime number or a perfect power. See: https://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/reso/015/10/0941-0947 https://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/reso/015/10/0941-0947 So, one could in theory create a list of primes (or perfect powers) populated them with hidden content using the aforesaid method and claim they are only a list of primes (or perfect powers).
  - deanCommie 5y ago
    Show me a way to take any random arbitrary image and do the calculation you discuss, and share the output, that is as easy as encoding that same image into the blockchain.
    - emteycz 5y ago
      https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/pifs https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/pifs
Jasper_ 5y ago
People throw this claim around, but note that: 1. It's only theorized that pi has this property. 2. Storing the starting index of the digit would likely be larger than any computer right now can hold, and possibly bigger than the estimated number atoms in the universe. 3. What a judge cares about is that you used the number with the intention of accessing the file, not the particular sleight of hand method by which you accessed it. If you cheekily share your favorite number that just so happens to be the starting digit index for "Limp Bizkit - Nookie.mp3", that's what the judge cares about. No need to outlaw pi, no need to outlaw numbers, it's all about intent. That's why they're called judges. They judge people and their intentions.
- tromp 5y ago
  A number that provably contains all finite bit patterns is X = . 1 10 11 100 101 110 111 0000 0001 ... (the binary version of Champernowne's constant [1]) but the index at which any pattern occurs takes more bits to write than that pattern itself, and the same would hold (on average) for patterns in pi, assuming it actually is normal. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champernowne_constant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champernowne_constant
onpensionsterm 5y ago
If true then the index of the data would be the file. That's called encryption.

seibelj 5y ago

I would say it’s physically impossible to restrict what an individual can do, regarding basically anything, without severe restrictions in freedom. However you can make fierce penalties for entities and organizations that promote, advertise, profit, etc. from actions which has a tendency to reduce it happening. For example it is trivially easy to film the TV at a bar, then tweet out the video of a sports game - millions do it every day. But if a company did that without the rights and earned money from it - an easy lawsuit.

emteycz 5y ago
Yeah, and there's the difference - putting it on a blockchain is incredibly permanent, and might not be easily attributable to a person.
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  In these cases the miners and the orgs who run the blockchains are the vulnerable parties hosting the content. I suspect it flies below the radar for enforcement mostly because offending material is basically there as a stunt rather than a place used for active proliferation. In the same way Roblox is full of IP infringement.
BlueTemplar 5y ago
The issue is that the damage here is almost irreversible - short of taking the whole blockchain down (which might be used as an excuse to do it ?). I guess that the penalties could be correspondingly high - like the difference between rendering someone temporarily unconscious versus killing them ?

pontifier 5y ago

It's an attack I've contemplated. If you started sending a whole bunch of plain text Tiananmen Square remembrance stuff you'd very quickly have China cracking down on whatever it was.

david_allison 5y ago
An image of tank man is already embedded in the blockchain.[0] CSAM links are there too.[1] [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/rbxupy/tankman_image_on_bitcoin_blockchain/hnt2yje https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/rbxupy/tankman_ima... [1] > 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). Notably, two of the explicit images were only detected by our suspicious transaction detector, i.e., they were not inserted via known services. https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf [SFW]
- kragen 5y ago
  Maybe this explains PRC's new hard-line anti-Bitcoin stance (over the last year).
  - TremendousJudge 5y ago
    Yeah, that's definitely it. I can't think of any other reason.
    - kragen 5y ago
      I can think of a couple.
5y ago

missblit 5y ago

I don't see why bitcoin nodes would be immune to DMCA takedown notices or other legal remedies. Sure it'd be a pain and (so far) not usually worth the hassle, but it'll have to come up eventually right? What's that? It's impossible to take down a block without messing up the entire blockchain? Well maybe Mr. Bitcoin should have thought of that when making the data so disturbingly entangled!

jeppesen-io 5y ago
A massive, multi-national takedown across the planet for 12k nodes? Thats well beyond the DMCA I can only imagine the cost to do that
- meheleventyone 5y ago
  Would you have to do that or would putting the squeeze on nodes in jurisdictions you could reach be enough? Not complying comes with a cost so presumably they would ultimately be forced out or to convince their peers to fork.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    extra-territorial enforcement? would you personally enjoy taking orders from China, or whoever the next global hegemon happens to be? Isn't it great to have some very remote and entirely unaccountable overlord telling you what to do, and then prosecute you criminally on a whim? Sounds like utopia.
    - herbst 5y ago
      Or just like America.
      - inter_netuser 5y ago
        two wrongs dont make a right. america should stop doing that.

throwaway22032 5y ago

In the engineering sense this has already happened. I'm not sure "abused" is the correct term, though. It's an immutable data store, like IPFS with a server in a jurisdiction you don't control. It stores data. Is it "abusing" ext4 if you use it to store a movie rip?

Traster 5y ago
I would say it's pretty clear cut that this is abuse in a different way than ext4 because the blockchain has a format for how it stores various fields and you store data by putting different data in those fields. For example the fake addresses to which they send bitcoin to generate transactions. It's also worth thinking about how this is used in the context of leaking data. Imagine if instead of posting Jennifer Lawrence's nudes on reddit, hackers had put them on the blockchain and just told people it was there. You now have an immutable copy of those photos stuck in a billion dollar speculative asset.
- throwaway22032 5y ago
  I agree that Bitcoin wasn't explicitly designed to store data. It was, however, designed to be uncensorable. Your second sentence there is - well, indeed. It _is_.
  - iszomer 5y ago
    Or worse, all the nuanced forms of a dead man's switch. [0] https://www.wired.com/2013/07/snowden-dead-mans-switch/ https://www.wired.com/2013/07/snowden-dead-mans-switch/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/58nn58/what_happened_with_the_julian_assange_dead_mans/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/58nn58/what_h... [2] https://sarcophagus.io/ https://sarcophagus.io/
    - throwaway22032 5y ago
      "Worse" in what way? To me that sounds beneficial. I'd do it myself if I had some blackmail on someone!

tirpen 5y ago

Yes it's a very valid concern. And you don't even have to go into porn territory, if the blockchain containans personally identifiable information, and it does, then it's probably in violation of the GDPR in the EU. Immutable data is almost never a good idea in practice.

iszomer 5y ago
This reminded me of Keybase where they signed and published [0] their root Merkle tree to the Bitcoin blockchain, as part of their server security mechanism. It was an ingenious idea at first until when it came to signature revocations. Even though they have the mechanism for that too, the data itself is still stored onto the blockchain forever with no "garbage collection" on deprecated data, outside of Keybase's control. [0] https://book.keybase.io/docs/server/merkle-root-in-bitcoin-blockchain https://book.keybase.io/docs/server/merkle-root-in-bitcoin-b... [1] https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_stellar_blockchain https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_stell...

usrusr 5y ago

If the article wasn't as old as it is (almost eight years), I'd take it as a given that the author deliberately omitted a whole lot of things that might put BTC in a bad light. Considering that even in 2014 the days of whole-number BTC amounting to play money had long been over, I wouldn't be surprised if there was self-censoring due to being personally invested even back then (but I wouldn't have suspected it back then)

kens 5y ago
I'm somewhat offended by your comment. For the record, I did not deliberately omit things that would put BTC in a bad light. I was not personally invested in Bitcoin (beyond a dollar or so for experiments). I wrote plenty of things negative about Bitcoin, enough to be disliked by part of the community.