• Child abuse imagery found within bitcoin's blockchain
    87 replies, posted
I'm not exactly sure. Getting one decent-quality photo on the blockchain would cost quite a lot of money at today's exchange fees. However, one angle I can see is the same thing that makes torrent sites "legal": they're not distributing the content, they're just distributing a hash. In the same way, if you successfully get a file onto the blockchain, all you'd have to do is give someone a list of transaction IDs where the data is stored. It'd be trivial to create a program to take a list of those and produce a file. The question is, how do you make it illegal to own or share the file of just transaction IDs? Is it possible?
That's assuming its in new blocks. If it's in old blocks from before the price went up then the cost would be almost nil.
This is the key part, my dude. It being an economy or having a history behind it is pretty irrelevant. Even here on FP we had a CP link posted back when we had a completely unregulated anonymous subforum. Which, presumably, is part of the reason we no longer have it.
I have to agree. This just reeks of an opportunity for bad actors to use the wide and rapid distribution of popular cryptos to immortalize malicious data, which then presents these cryptocurriencies with a very treacherous ultimatum: legally endanger every single user who downloads your blockchain, or scrub the offending data and risk the whole currency getting forked like what happened to Etherium. This could actually be the thing that brings cryptocurrencies down for good (at least the current popular ones), because it suddenly turns them into a major legal liability.
It's sort of possible to make a workaround patch on a case-by-case basis for this, but it's more or less a systematic flaw. For now, purely theoretically speaking, you can call the police on just about any miner and have them arrested for CP distribution (since most clients also seed afaik).
Um..Maybe watch your tone? This sort of passive agressive idiot calling is really not required.
Child porn is treated differently than copyright infringement. Knowingly possessing data that can be decrypted into child porn is an offense (in the US at least). There are even cases tried where the defended should have reasonably known. Burying your head in the sand isn't a defense for child porn. It might get you out of harsher treatment in copyright infringement, but it's not getting you out of child porn. The laws are significantly stricter because they don't want even the possibility of someone using "but it's not technically child porn" as an excuse.
I know, last time I looked at a $5 bill, I got a face full of kiddie porn.
Probably trolling. Just like when someone embedded virus signatures into the blockchain to trip AVs.
Hope this makes Bitcoin mining die out so poor people like me can buy GPUs again.
Now I wonder if you could do something like that with banks and wire transfers. Send very small amounts of money through a cash office, add a part of the base64-encoded data as the transaction's concept to each, if anyone asks you sell shit through eBay and that text is for verification purposes... Unlike public bitcoin chains, nobody would know about this deal, "random garbage text" would probably not trip up any flags.. Sure the receiver wouldn't be anonymous, but if it doesn't ever get investigated...
I can't wait to put images of postals ass into bitcoin and have it automatically sent to everyone regardless if they see it or not.
finally a good use for the community fund
Again for the millionth time: Bitcoin miners aren't the ones buying your GPUs. Any BTC mining operation that covers its own electricity costs is using ASICs, because the difficulty is so astronomical that GPU's just wont ever make you money. Even if you have completely 100% free electricity you wouldn't mine BTC on the GPUs, you'd either sell them for proper mining hardware or mine ZEC/ETH and actually make some money.
Yes, agree.
Ok but the OP is not mis-information, is it?
No, There Isn’t Child Porn on the Bitcoin Blockchain
It is a bit of a weird article since it fist says the story is fake and/or old from 2013 and then continues to talk about the 2017 paper which is pretty much what the recent articles are about. Then it talks about how links are not the same as the files themselves when the researchers clearly state Researchers from the RWTH Aachen University, Germany found that around 1,600 files were currently stored in bitcoin’s blockchain. Of the files least eight were of sexual content, including one thought to be an image of child abuse and two that contain 274 links to child abuse content, 142 of which link to dark web services. Quite dishonest. And not a single disprove of what the researchers actually are saying.
Yes, I told u it's biased, but still it explains why it's bullshit eitherway. And second point to make: The NSA Worked to “Track Down” Bitcoin Users, Snowden Documents .. Why storing images on BTC is not in anyway safer or smarter anyway.
I don't see the explaination why it is bullshit. The files are in there.
can't say im not surprised
There are, but they can be pruned after some time since BTC doesn't need that data to keep functioning.
Nope, that's basically the entire point. Each block in the "blockchain" contains a hash of the entirety of the last block - including this data. You can't change any of it without breaking the chain.
OP_RETURN
This is revenge targeted at shitcoiners for driving up graphic card prices Heh, you mad now? You should have invested in stinky linky when you had the chance :v
What, if anything, does this solve? You can freely create junk bitcoin wallets and send them transactions while embedding metadata in the transaction. Those coins are not 'burnable'.
So the short version is that some dodgy fellas are making disposable bitcoin wallets and bitcoining their kiddy porn to each other in the transaction metadata and as a result it's getting found in the block chain since bitcoin records all transactions?
Not exactly. It's a ridiculously inefficient way to transmit information, and it's not really a "secure" way of doing it either. It's unlikely to be actual pedophiles, and is far more likely someone deliberately doing it to poison the block chain. As already addressed by other people previously, stuff that is in the block chain cannot be removed. ... Well. That's not technically accurate either. You can remove whatever you want from a block chain by getting community consensus and creating a hard fork for the data. If the majority of people adopt a new standard with that information removed, they can take over the network and establish that as the new standard. Etherium has already done this a couple of times to address some critical security flaws. However, what you have to keep in mind is that every time you do this, you are effectively creating a schism. That schism will invariably remove some users, and the fact that it's even possible in the first place undermines the integrity and trustworthiness of the system. Because cryptos are by their very definition designed to be unregulated, there is no governing body besides consensus through majority rule. In other words, if a malicious actor gains a majority (some cryptos require a supermajority) of a given network, they can theoretically control everything about it. That includes creating fake transactions, or just ignoring/unwinding certain ones. It's an underlying problem that has been discussed as an attack vector numerous times throughout bitcoin's history. Selectively removing items without consensus isn't a conveniently solvable problem either. Any system that can unwind, remove, or blacklist a series of transactions used to embed child porn in the block chain could just as easily be used to remove legitimate transactions, which would obviously be disastrous. On the other hand, if you don't have such a system, it's pretty easy for someone with an agenda and moderately deep pockets to repeatedly poison the block chain and force hard fork after hard fork. Every time you fork, you create some form of downtime or instability. It's not impossible for someone with very deep pockets to repeatedly poison the block chain to specifically try and hinder or eliminate a direct competitor by repeatedly involving that competitor's wallet(s) in transactions. Selectively picking and choosing transactions to delete is far more involved than just bulk deleting a ton of them. Deleting everything child porn related to satisfy government entities while maintaining legitimate transactions through community consensus is practically impossible to achieve in a timely fashion, particularly if it happens every couple of days. In such a situation, investors (the big ones, not your weekend daytrader gambling away their kid's college funds) are going to eventually get sick of the market instability and they will pull out.
There exists pruning for BTC nodes, you are not required to run full node. So any content (including illegal) will get removed over time anyway.
"Over time" cannot be both long enough to make it adequate enough for record keeping and short enough to keep the feds happy at the same time.
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