What would happen if someone encoded something horrible and illegal like child porn into a blockchain? Is everyone who operates on that chain guilty of possession? Does that make a specific crypto "illegal" if its blockchain contains illegal content?
Which is a fancy way of saying that they haven't. The only images in the bitcoin blockchain are ascii art.
There are plenty of hashes of different types of data in the bitcoin blockchain, but hashes are not the hash function's input data.
Schneier himself repeated this bogus "there's illegal content in the bitcoin blockchain already!" claim, which shows the legs this false meme has on it.
Please stop repeating this falsehood.
JPG of Nelson Mandela encoded into bitcoin blockchain: http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photo...
Illegal porn and classified documents embedded in the blockchain (page 3): https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/pdf-33/accenture-editing...
Original research source: https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf
By that definition, however, every file could be transformed into an illegal one through a suitable cipher and key.
Then there's the concept of steganography.
Digital data is interesting for sure.
(Unless you’re saying that the bits 0 and 1 already exist in the blockchain, which is reaaaaallllyyy stretching the definition.)
There’s the concept of “illegal numbers”, which means that there are technically numeric representations of images or copyrighted material that you can’t know/possess without breaking a law. But the law is subjective which is why we have judges and juries to apply judgement to whether having a large number written on a piece of paper is equivalent to possessing illegal material.
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There’s the concept of “illegal numbers”, which means that there are technically numeric representations of images or copyrighted material that you can’t know/possess without breaking a law. But the law is subjective which is why we have judges and juries to apply judgement to whether having a large number written on a piece of paper is equivalent to possessions illegal material.
There is no person they can throw in jail, no corporation that can be sued, no servers that can be seized, domains taken over, etc, that will result in that data no longer being available to those that know where to look for it.
The data just remains online until such a time that the coins of a given chain are worth $0.0 and coin holders no longer have a financial incentive to keep the ledger online.
FWIW the ones I talked to where more of the door kicking variety, not the 'cyber' type.
The point wasnt that I put their logo on a chain, its that I could put a photo online that the states monopoly on violence was entirely incapable of removing.
The FBI doesn't give a single damn hoot about "data exfiltration" via blockchain metadata. Anyone with half an understanding of any of those terms knows what an absurd implication that is.
For concerns about "data exfiltration", discussing blockchain doesn't even make a single damn bit of sense. Blockchain is about impermanence and publishing, not about "exfiltration".
I'm not sure which is more amusing, thinking that the FBI would give a hoot about b64-encoded data in the metadata of a transaction, or that this person wrote that comment on HN to try and seem cool. LOL, what, the FBI reached out to them (how?/why? nothing about this makes sense)?
Lots of distasteful outcomes possible.