Blockchains Never Forget
ribbonfarm.com
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And isn't this also how ordinary accounting systems work?
The place where it breaks down is that Bitcoin is for anonymous people who don't trust each other. With fraud there is no forgiveness.
In many other systems, people are not anonymous and mistaken transactions can be reversed, using the court system if it comes to that.
You don't always have to remove something, you just need to introduce doubt. It only took x% industry shills to make any evidence for climate change effectively disappear for a lot of people.
If you don't want to pay you also "abuse" Certificate Transparency logs to do basically the same job, just like Mozilla with their Binary Transparency [2].
[0]: https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_bitco...
Imagine that a vindictive person embeds the bytes of a graphic explicit child rape video into the ledger. All subsequent blocks will depend on those "bad bytes" so they can't be erased. For the later blocks to be trusted, everyone must have a copy of those bytes.
What is society's response? Live with those bad blocks to maintain the trust in the chain? Or does a majority agree to fork a new chain (ala Ethereum/DAO) that removes the bad bytes?
Even if a fork happens, the trolling/defacing of bad bytes into the worldwide blockchain is a tempting method to force everyone to have a copy of your "graffiti". The new fork would simply be a new target to deface. A smaller example of "bad bytes" is doxing someone's Social Security # or home address. (For all we know, some of the transaction amounts in some Bitcoin blocks may represent "bad bytes" but nobody has made the knowledge public yet to ruin a person's life. E.g. Bitcoin block #403891 has Jennifer Lawrence's SSN#.)
In essence, the permanence of the block chain can be used as a weapon against it. It doesn't mean the blockchain concept is unusable but there doesn't seem to be an easy computer-science answer for it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...
I think for the average person who doesn't use Tor, they will not stumble across child rape videos with a search for keywords "child rape videos" in Google or Bing.
However, if it's embedded in a global blockchain where the end user must have a copy of those illegal bytes for the blockchain to be verified & trusted, does that mean every blockchain user is committing a crime by storing bytes of child pornography? If someone wanted to sabotage a blockchain, it's hard to think of a better way to deface it.
That response doesn't engage with the difficult scenario I laid out. To restate: If you want a law-abiding-wouldn't-hurt-a-fly citizen to participate in the blockchain, the citizen must copy the illegal child pornography to his harddrive to satisfy the functionality of the blockchain. The citizen is not "searching for it"; instead, the citizen must have it.
Even if someone has no knowledge of, or intent related to, the possession of child porn, it's still illegal.
A person who downloads that video unknowingly via the blockchain is probably morally in the clear, however they're very much not in the clear with the law.
You can claim that some random set of data on someone's machine is an encrypted child porno video, and provide a "key" that would decrypt it.
Try explaining why that's not real to a clueless judge.
Anyway, i hope the legal system would recognize the difference between having intent to store cp and not having such intent. Otherwise anyone can be made or proven to have stored it.
Judges aren't stupid. You can easily explain why the random data isn't something. You can't explain your way out of unencrypted data being objectively there.
> Anyway, i hope the legal system would recognize the difference between having intent to store cp and not having such intent.
If you know how blockchains work, then it is intentional.
> Otherwise anyone can be made or proven to have stored it.
Not for any real standard of proof.
It's simply not an easy question to give an easy answer to.
(not justifying CP, just saying that it's just as bad as the above)
I.e. yesterday i embedded an innocuous message into Bitcoin's blockchain. Can you see it? I doubt it, unless you are willing to go through and decode some hundreds of thousands of recent transactions.
For anyone to notice, i'll have to post a link - https://bitaps.com/97804baa2ce19454c61eeda3de1bb99fc6b005f8a...
Conceptually, it's the same as posting a link like dg251kctuhnoj3f4.onion/timmy_suffers_part_1.avi - unless you are actively looking for the bad bytes or have a link sent to you, you are unlikely to find them.
Thus, no need for forks or any extra drastic actions.
Now, one might argue the benefits outweigh the harm. That would be a different discussion even though the article does list some of them. It gives a start on it.
So how does a decentralized system avoid the (seemingly) inevitable pressure/threat to centralize?
Proof-of-work, however, makes it expensive to modify history. But it doesn't change the fact that, in order to prevent data loss, the only solution is backups at multiple, independent locations.
By this logic, we must all stop all communications, for communicating can be evil. Good bye first amendment.
It removes all of the below and then some.
"That never happened.
Forget I said that.
Can we start again?
I’m just going to pretend you didn’t just say that."