An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]

https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf

by nvarsj • 8 years ago

141 151 8 years ago

fc18.ifca.ai

randomerr• 8 years ago

If you can trade and breed Pokemon-esque creature in the blockchain, why not illegal content? It's practically untraceable and you don't have to go to trouble of running something like and onion skin router to obscure your identity.

CryptoKitties craze slows down transactions on Ethereum

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42237162

arthurcolle3• 8 years ago

god this is reposted so many times, SOO MANY TIMES

public service advisory: read the whole btc wiki, there's a lot of great stuff in there!

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Agent

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Script

Links of note: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bootstrapping-a-decentr...

vincnetas• 8 years ago

I don't see relation between these links and the topic. Could you be more specific?

Arnavion• 8 years ago

The fact that transactions are scripts is one of the ways that a miner can embed arbitrary data in the blockchain (eg via https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/OP_RETURN ), which is what the paper is about.

I don't know why the links for agents are relevant.

banachtarski3• 8 years ago

oh great cryptocurrency zealot, how must we repent for our transgressions against the faith?

arthurcolle3• 8 years ago

Unfortunately... you cannot. Your sins in particular are embedded on one of potentially infinite future blockchains and will be read back to you for the remainder of eternity, in shifts

dang2• 8 years ago

Please don't make the site worse by posting like this, regardless of how annoying another comment may be.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

banachtarski3• 8 years ago

So we can't even retort mildly tongue and cheek without being flagged by a salty cryptocurrency preacher these days

arthurcolle3• 8 years ago

I loved your comment, and made a funny in response of my own. Don't assume you're right all the time :)

jwilk2• 8 years ago

Abstract:

Blockchains primarily enable credible accounting of digital events, e.g., money transfers in cryptocurrencies. However, beyond this original purpose, blockchains also irrevocably record arbitrary data, ranging from short messages to pictures. This does not come without risk for users as each participant has to locally replicate the complete blockchain, particularly including potentially harmful content. We provide the first systematic analysis of the benefits and threats of arbitrary blockchain content. Our analysis shows that certain content, e.g., illegal pornography, can render the mere possession of a blockchain illegal. Based on these insights, we conduct a thorough quantitative and qualitative analysis of unintended content on Bitcoin’s blockchain. Although most data originates from benign extensions to Bitcoin’s protocol, our analysis reveals more than 1600 files on the blockchain, over 99 % of which are texts or images. Among these files there is clearly objectionable content such as links to child pornography, which is distributed to all Bitcoin participants. With our analysis, we thus highlight the importance for future blockchain designs to address the possibility of unintended data insertion and protect blockchain users accordingly.

elmar2• 8 years ago

"illegal pornography, can render the mere possession of a blockchain illegal."

I see this as a very strong legal attack vector on full nodes and cryptocurrencies, probably a way around it, is to only allow meta information on a cryptographic form, even then the owner can publish the view key publicly.

A drastic solution is to just prune or don't even allow metadata.

CamTin• 8 years ago

You don't even need the ability to record metadata on-chain to encode arbitrary data. An agreed-upon method of encoding it into ordinary transactions is enough. Even if BTC-style transactions were just inputs/outputs (they're not), you could still encode information down into the satoshi-place of the inputs or outputs themselves. It's even worse for something like Ethereum: essentially the whole point of that blockchain is to encode abritrary (executable) metadata in the form of the contracts themselves.

Moodles3• 8 years ago

Some interesting graffiti on the bitcoin blockchain: http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photo...

I have always wondered this. What will a country do if someone embeds child pornography or a picture of Mohammed or something in the blockchain? Will it then be illegal to store the blockchain in that country? Is a link to such an image much different to an actual image? It seems hard to ever stop this happening with a public permissionless blockchain, pretty much by design.

bb883• 8 years ago

What will a country do if someone embeds child pornography or a picture of Mohammed or something in the blockchain?

In the US at least, I'd hope that we probably wouldn't criminalize 1M people for the actions of 1. Hopefully in other countries they wouldn't do that either.

aiCeivi9• 8 years ago

Well it depends. If blockchain stored on disk directly contains knows know illegal content it will be picked up by some scanners used by law enforcement. Just like pirated software it won't be enough on it's own but might be a good leverage in the original case that caused computer hardware seizure.

Tepix• 8 years ago

There is a possibility of a technical solution:

- You create a special rule for a block known to contain illegal data.

- The illegal data in the block gets NULLed. The other transactions are left untouched.

- The checksum for the next block is no longer calculated, instead it is hardcoded. This means there is no way of verifying the transactions in that block. Perhaps you add a new signature for the block with the NULLed data to make it harder to tamper with.

Once you start doing this workaround once you will probably have to do it repeatedly.

gsich3• 8 years ago

The first one would be horrible. The second one, eeh who cares.

Not much you can do about it anyway.

AndrewOMartin2• 8 years ago

Certain people.

Moodles3• 8 years ago

Just to be clear: I'm not suggesting we should implement blasphemy laws :-)

zeth___8• 8 years ago

I haven't looked for obvious reasons but back in the day people were saying that there was already child porn embedded in bitcoin: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=671894.0

Which is why child porn is one of the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, and money launderers.

That we are trying to apply flesh space laws to bits just goes to show how stupid we still are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime

Until we change the laws we have to meet the needs of digital computers instead of the printing press we will have these ridiculous ways of attacking useful new technology.

Tomte5• 8 years ago

I have no need to legalize child porn just because you think it's necessary for "computers".

dpwm• 8 years ago

I'm reading this charitably as you saying that laws that criminalise distribution regardless of intent or knowledge need to be changed to recognise that with the internet people can effectively commit crimes without knowledge or intent. This is particularly relevant where distribution of material (child porn, terrorist material) is criminalised.

This seems a really difficult area that's almost incompatible with the way we do criminal law, because intent and knowledge are so hard to prove either way. Even where there's plenty of circumstantial evidence of intent it is not going to prove it either way.

You could plan to murder somebody for years, leave an evidence trail and then run them over by complete accident. Should that be premeditated murder or manslaughter? In the eyes of a jury it will almost certainly be premeditated murder. You could black out at the wheel and for a while have no knowledge that you have killed. From the philosophical perspective the lines are blurry: Only the individual can actually know, and given the amount to which people can self-delude themselves, even that isn't guaranteed.

Juries do not make decisions on reasonable doubt, and often default to balance of probabilities. Depending on the jurisdiction, when a unanimous verdict cannot be determined a majority one is accepted.

Let's say I have a HDD I write random data to as a block device. What are the implications for me in twenty years if somebody creates an image file format that can decompress some of the linear subregions of my random HDD data. I haven't the time now to do anything but a very simple analysis of this. Intuitively this depends on the size of the drive and the size of the compressed file. Let's say for arguments sake it can encode a prohibited piece of data in 10kB.

At what point of completely random storage material are you likely to have a forbidden piece of data? Well, each terrabyte contains approximately 1e12 such linear subsequences. And we need 1e3010 such subsequences to match a forbidden sequence. So that's 1e2998 or so TB if there is only one forbidden piece of data. With more I think the birthday paradox kicks in. Now if we can encode the forbidden data in 8 bytes or such then we reach the problem much sooner. I doubt that will happen somehow.

amelius2• 8 years ago

Note that we only need one number to capture all possible finite content (i.e., the number is chosen such that all binary strings will appear somewhere in the binary representation of the number). A "normal number" [1] satisfies this property. And it is believed that Pi is a normal number.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number

philfrasty• 8 years ago

There was a tweet [1] from Vitalik Buterin on this exact topic. He was arguing that „possession“ (as in data on the blockchain) does not impose risks on others. Tweet was removed quickly.

[1] https://steemit.com/ethereum/@titusfrost/ethereum-s-vitalik-...

zeth___8• 8 years ago

This entire Ethereum to me wreaks of New World Order involvement, just look at the members of the Ethereum Alliance.
Also I would suggest trying EOS which is supposed to wipe out Ethereum and hopefully will. I now fully endorse EOS as an alternative to Ethereum.
I also wanted to address the slanderous attacks against me stating that I am an "Anti-Semite" which is completely bogus. I criticize Zionists who are at the very top of the New World Order Power structure, just under the Jesuits.

What the fuck did I just read?

OscarCunningham2• 8 years ago

The paper says that the bitcoin blockchain already contains illegal content. In particular copyrighted material and possible child pornography. More precisely:

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

(I don't know exactly what it would mean to "verify" that an image contains child pornography, since in the US and UK at least some of the relevant laws refer only to what the image "depicts", not to the age of the people used in its manufacture. Either way, the copyrighted content seems enough to establish the illegality of the blockchain in principle.) It seems unlikely that any prosecutions will happen though, because blockchain technology has a lot of mainstream support.

martindale• 8 years ago

Title is sensationalism. Actual paper title is "A Quantitative Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin" — see also Illegal Numbers [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

zeth___8• 8 years ago

The paper isn't wrong though. There are supposedly numbers that correspond to illegal jpg images in the bitcoin block chain.

omginternets• 8 years ago

There are supposedly numbers that correspond to illegal jpg images in the bitcoin block chain.

How did they come about? Do you have a source for this?

sctb• 8 years ago

Thanks, we've reverted the title from the submitted “Illegal content embedded in the blockchain” to that of the paper.

mtgx• 8 years ago

How do you keep the blockchain uncensorable if you start accounting for child porn, and copyright, and all this other stuff that "needs to be taken down".

And if you do all of those things, why even bother with the blockchain and all of its cons in the first place? All that remains is the completely accountable surveillance of users, and I believe that becoming a bigger surveillance machine than even Facebook ever was wasn't the original vision for the blockchain.

I think that unless the main blockchain projects such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and so on, don't start implementing anonymity by default soon, in a few years they won't be allowed to do it anymore.

hndamien• 8 years ago

One can hope that the Monero market cap catches up with Bitcoin for this very reason.

bsenftner• 8 years ago

This is obvious, even to the casual observer (who care to think beyond the hype.) If this did not occur to you, and you are into bitcoin/cryptocurrencies, you should get out as you're way above your head. (expecting down votes to the truth.)

pfortuny• 8 years ago

Well, it depends on the design: the format of each entry might be fixed (think of a specific blockchain for a specific task). Yes, a generalistic blockchain is quite likely unable to avoid this.

But who knows.

userbinator2• 8 years ago

the format of each entry might be fixed (think of a specific blockchain for a specific task).

As long as you can distinguish between a 0 and 1, or any two states in general, you can store and represent arbitrary data. This basic premise is what makes digital computers so flexible and powerful, and how things like stenography and crypto work.

dang2• 8 years ago

This comment breaks two of the site guidelines: the one that asks people not to go on about voting (let alone downvote-bait), and this one: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

Saying that someone's work is obvious except to idiots doesn't teach anybody anything; it's just striking a pose. Please don't do that here; instead, explain. If you don't have time to explain, you can save yourself even more time by not posting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

rogual2• 8 years ago

Isn't intent generally a big deal in law? If I argued that your innocent MS Word doc was illegal because it decoded to child abuse images under a special encoding scheme I just made up, I'd be laughed out of court, and rightly so. It's technically true, but irrelevant. No crime was committed. Doesn't the same principle apply here?

cstross2• 8 years ago

In the UK (and, I believe, the USA) child pornography is a "strict liability" issue — intent is irrelevant, mere possession is itself illegal. This is how teens get nailed for receiving unasked-for sexts from their under-age-of-consent SO.

As with illegal drugs and, in the UK, unlicensed firearms, this means the prosecution doesn't need to prove intent. (Mandatory — usually harsh — sentence terms are usually part of the package with strict liability offenses.)

runeb• 8 years ago

So if a person sees you are about to have your phone searched by police they can send you child pornography and you will go to jail? It somehow doesn't sound like it would hold up in court. At least I feel like it should not.

bluesign2• 8 years ago

But we are talking here about not exactly "possession". Imagine I sent you a funny video, but somehow, I appended it with child pornography image, which your video player will easily skip, unless you are specifically looking via forensic measures.

dandare• 8 years ago

I don't know enough about UK laws or laws in general, but it should be easy to discredit such law. It only takes one rebel tech savvy teen to send his nude sext to whatever celebrity/politician email/phone he can guess while alarming the police - and the press to stir as much shit as possible.

Actually, pardon me for a minute, I have sci-fi short to write :).

stordoff2• 8 years ago

There IS a mental element to possession in UK law:

Section 160(1) creates an offence for a person to have any indecent photograph or pseudo-photograph of a child in his possession. [...] "Possession" involves both a physical and mental element. [...] The mental element is knowledge. A defendant must knowingly have custody and control of the photographs found on the device in question.

Downloading the blockchain, should it contain such images, would constitute "making", but it subject to similar mental requirements:

The act of making or taking the indecent photograph or pseudo-photograph must be a deliberate and intentional act, done with the knowledge that the image made is, or is likely to be, an indecent photograph or pseudo-photograph of a child.

I suspect that not knowing that the blockchain does contain such images, not having knowledge of which transactions do, and that it requires specialised decoding rather than just being embedded per se/a default/intended usage would be enough to raise a defence.

https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/indecent-images-childr...

bluesign2• 8 years ago

I think it is technically impossible at least improbable to make such encoding scheme, unless your encoding becomes the content itself.

ddalex• 8 years ago

So the obvious bit here is that an adversarial actor can poison the blockchain with bits that make downloading, storing and processing the blockchain a highly illegal act.

This may have a chilling effect on participating in the network, thus reducing the number of nodes, and undermining the trust on the blockchain and in the coin because the reduced requirement of computing power needed to mutate the blockchain.

Accordingly a determined actor with enough resources (e.g. a nation-state) can render the bitcoin value-less and use-less at will....

phkahler• 8 years ago

In addition to illegal content, one could just put a huge amount of data in there to accelerate what seems to be a built in problem of ever increasing storage requirements.

paulgb• 8 years ago

The size of each block is fixed, and the transaction fee is proportional to the number of bytes in the transaction, so you could block people from making transactions (if you were willing to outbid them) but couldn't make the chain grow faster.

icelancer• 8 years ago

> one could just put a huge amount of data in there

That, ah, isn't how that works. You can't just dump terabytes into the blockchain for BTC, LTC, or really any blockchain I can think of that has any sort of adoption.

TazeTSchnitzel• 8 years ago

There's a 1MB cap on block size and it's already being met.

chaz6• 8 years ago

I thought the same thing about PGP/GPG keyservers. They are supposed to be immutable so if someone uploaded a key containing a jpeg attachment depicting illegal content, the only course of action would be to wipe every server in the network.

jwilk2• 8 years ago

Keys aren't immutable. You can remove UIDs you don't like. Even if they were immutable, at least in theory, a keyserver could censor whole keys.

But apparently this is a practical problem. Phil Pennock wrote on oss-security (http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2017/q4/375):

[...] we've had keyservers in Europe shut down because of privacy demands because an append-only mesh-fill datastore can't remove keys and people send out their email address and name paired into a key and then get upset because it's out there; we're one illicit-material-in-photo-uid incident away from global shutdown.

simias3• 8 years ago

Keyservers are convenient but they're not critical to PGP's functionality. There are other ways to distribute public keys. Actually in general public key servers are only mildly useful because you can't really trust anything you get from them, you have to use your web of trust of some other way to validate that the key is valid.

On the other hand if you wipe (even partially) Bitcoin's blockchain your basically destroy the currency.

VMG7• 8 years ago

The data embedded in the blockchain can only be extracted using custom tools.

Custom tools can be used to extract any data from almost any other kind of other data, using steganography. You can extract illegal data from innocuous looking tweets, using the right tools.

zaarn2• 8 years ago

If the extraction tools do not exceed the cryptographic complexity of a OTP cipher, I doubt that any court will accept that excuse.

It's the difference between taking random bits of your computer to assemble illegal content vs taking one specific set of bits and applying mere transforms to then to retrieve illegal content.

arcticfox• 8 years ago

That's a bit of a stretch. There's no reason to obfuscate anything (unless miners are actively and intentionally censoring content) and it'd be straightforward to make a browser.

For example, I don't think it's a defense for the owner of a website to say "this horrible illegal content I'm sharing is only accessible via a custom tool that downloads and decodes image data from me...such as a web browser."

simias3• 8 years ago

If said tweets were reported they would (probably?) be deleted. I'm not sure the "custom tool" defense would really work, you could say the same thing for warez on usenet or even simple jpegs and videos, you need special codecs to view them. Furthermore even plain text embedded in the chain might be enough to get you in trouble in some jurisdiction if it contains hate speech, personal info or harassment material for instance.

The problem with the blockchain is actually its greatest strength: it's immutable. If somebody reports a block containing child porn there's no way to remove it without compromising the blockchain's integrity.

zone4114• 8 years ago

As per my other post here, you don't need anything more than a file to hex converter like http://tomeko.net/online_tools/hex_to_file.php?lang=en and the ability to calculate the gas cost to post on the Ethereum blockchain (second largest coin by market cap and transaction volume).

wongarsu• 8 years ago

Sure, tweets can contain illegal content. That illegal content can be steganographically hidden in innocent images. What makes all this legal for twitter is that as soon as they are aware of illegal content, they delete it. It doesn't matter how well hidden it is, what matters are their actions once they know.

That's the problem with the blockchain: there is no mechanism for deleting data (well, there's pruning, but that's meant to save storage space after processing all the data).

jmcqk6• 8 years ago

Especially if you consider the possibility of someone loading state secrets onto the chain. It wouldn't take a state actor to initiate that action, but that state actor could render the chain worthless.

otherwiseguy3• 8 years ago

That isn't as much of an issue. Once a secret is out, it is out. Something like child porn would be permanently illegal and permanently stored in the chain. Imagine hiding it there, letting a year or two of transactions build upon it before letting people know it was there. You can't remove it. The blockchain is now technically illegal.

I was just thinking about this a lot this week, actually. The really crazy thing is that, due to the PROTECT Act, a person in Japan could legally upload certain manga that the US would consider CP. So one wouldn't even have to risk jail to poison the blockchain.

jasode• 8 years ago

an adversarial actor can poison the blockchain with bits that make downloading, storing and processing the blockchain a highly illegal act.

Exactly. I brought up the same scenario recently.[1]

The top 2 replies to my comment was basically, "unless you're looking for illegal data, it's not a problem."

That head-in-the-sand ignorance completely misses the point. It's not about how _you_ specifically ignore illegal data and therefore, you have absolution of guilt. It's about the whole world's response to bad data in the blockchain.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14434786

elmar2• 8 years ago

and the developers of the software what would be the legal standing if they are residents of countries like the USA?

could they be persecuted as facilitators of the ilegal distribution?

oasisbob2• 8 years ago

This gets close to something else I've been pondering lately - how to deal with immutable data structures in the realm of GDPR.

Recitations in GDPR require systems to be designed with privacy in mind. Immutable structures like the Bitcoin blockchain or Merkle trees in other applications would seem to be fundamentally incompatible with some GDPR privacy requirements.

Let's say Google receives a valid right to be forgotten request for an entry in one of their Certificate Transparency logs? Then what? I don't see how it can be dealt with without destroying the integrity of the log.

ckastner• 8 years ago

Recitations in GDPR require systems to be designed with privacy in mind. Immutable structures like the Bitcoin blockchain or Merkle trees in other applications would seem to be fundamentally incompatible with some GDPR privacy requirements.

And against whom would I claim my rights, for example: my right to be forgotten (Article 17: The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller the erasure of personal data concerning him or her without undue delay [...])?

In the case of a distributed blockchain, who is the controller as defined by the GDPR?

And even if one could identify a controller (say, in the case of a blockchain under centralized control), there are still exceptions to the rights of data subjects. Privacy is key to the GDPR, but not an absolute.

pjc50• 8 years ago

Every person running a full node would theoretically be a controller in that case. But as you say, you could probably make a "business requirements" case if it's just a certificate. Right to be forgotten does not include the right to demand people forget that you owe them money, for example.

What gets more complex is if you put non-business-related "sensitive" personal data in an immutable system, e.g. if you're building an illegal blacklist of union organisers.

greenleafjacob• 8 years ago

Simply encrypt the data and upon “deleting it” instead delete the encryption key. This is similar to concerns about backups.

oasisbob2• 8 years ago

Sure, crypto-shredding seems like a great approach for some things.

But in many cases the whole reason systems use these structures in the first place is so that there's transparency and public verifiability.

jerf2• 8 years ago

I'm not sure it's that shocking a result that data impacted by GDPR may not be stored in an immutable format, given that the law requires you to mutate it under certain circumstances.

There's probably an interesting computer science problem here in how to create a data structure that retains as many advantages as possible from the immutable data structures, but still allows compliance with the GDPR.

cesarb• 8 years ago

Some immutable data structures can cope with missing data. Merkle trees are an example: to validate that a leaf is part of the tree, you don't need any of the other leafs (only their direct or indirect hashes). For the Bitcoin blockchain, it has been designed so that transactions where all outputs have been spent can be pruned, after the spending transactions have been validated. It wouldn't be hard to extend this to prune "illegal" transactions, even after they've been included in valid blocks; the only consequence would be that a node wouldn't be able to validate other transactions spending these "illegal" transactions (so it would have to risk accepting an invalid transaction, or rejecting a valid transaction, in both cases risking being on the wrong side of a fork).

chrisabrams• 8 years ago

You would still have the history of those transaction(s) before they were pruned though...

jakeogh• 8 years ago

It's an attack on memory, part of the War On General Purpose Computing.

def-• 8 years ago

If you are interested in this kind of paper, it was in today's morning paper: https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/03/19/a-quantitive-analysis-of...

zone4114• 8 years ago

Not too long ago, I checked the number of images that were posted on the Ethereum blockchain and I also posted a test image (https://etherscan.io/tx/0x3ee5575306ddc235b0586984172888b47e...). There were 74 images with headers that appeared as jpg, gif, or png already posted before my test image. It's very easy to post to the Ethereum blockchain: just convert back and forth from file to hex using a site like http://tomeko.net/online_tools/hex_to_file.php?lang=en. You might also have to calculate how much gas will be used. I opened a few images and I saw a couple selfies but the oldest jpeg is a certain infamous image from 1999 that I don't think anybody cares to see. I anticipated the chance of illegal images (though it's not exactly a novel idea so I figured somebody would notice it has happened by now if an illegal image has been on the blockchain for a while), so I haven't opened others.

wakkaflokka• 8 years ago

Does etherscan let you search the "Input Data" of a transaction? I can see somebody building a script to parse the blockchain for image headers and convert the hex to a file now that this 'idea' has hit the mainstream. Going to be interesting to see what happens with this.

zone4114• 8 years ago

I wrote the script to parse the Ethereum blockchain from a local copy myself.

nosuchthing• 8 years ago

Goatse?

zone4114• 8 years ago

Yes.

tromp• 8 years ago

We thus believe that future blockchain designs must proactively cope with objectionable content.

The MimbleWimble blockchain design [1] on the other hand doesn't leave any room to add freely chosen data, mostly due to the lack of any form of scripts.

[1] http://mimblewimble.cash/

hapnin2• 8 years ago

When PGP was released in the early 90s, one of the arguments used against it was "child porn". When P2P networks using DHT became viable earlier in this century, one of the arguments used against the networks was "child porn".

The tech still remains and still functions, arguments or not.

otherwiseguy3• 8 years ago

The difference is between "the technology" and an "implementation of the technology". Sure, P2P DHT exists. Just like blockchains exist. But a specific blockchain, which is append-only, is trivial to make illegal by embedding illegal content in it, making every user of it technically in possession of illegal material. You can use a DHT w/o breaking the law. You cannot store child porn on your computer without breaking the law.

hapnin2• 8 years ago

What you say is completely true and I agree.

So who's going to shut a blockchain down? I don't see it happening.

posterboy• 8 years ago

In some cases a link to a file is enough, which would implicate DHT, but due to the nature of the distribution would not compromise the whole network. Cf. Pirate Bay.

bryanph_• 8 years ago

The solution is simple. You need a cryptocurrency where the primitives are simple and predictable. Basically the same reason we don't use eval() on user input. This might very well mean the end for bitcoin if legal parties pick up on this.

XR0CSWV3h3kZWg• 8 years ago

For the cases where data is encoded as the P2PK address those tx should be safe the prune, although downloading them to verify the block would be necessary.

m3kw9• 8 years ago

Isn’t this more like someone throw a stolen item in your bag without you consenting or knowing?

An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]

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