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Comment by clemensley | Hacker News Reader

So what happens if someone post illegal content to this? As it's on the blockchain it cannot ever be deleted. Plus anyone what stores the Ethereum blockchain (for example to mine or run a node) now has illegal content on their hard drive as well. How will this play out?

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Well it appears we will find out very soon

Doesn't appear images are actually stored, just linked. So imgur or whoever would, presumably, remove it and miners would just have a broken link in their blockchain.

I can't think of plaintext that would be both illegal and small enough to store in the blockchain.

Extortion and threats are both short and illegal in the US. Ideally, it would only be illegal to create them in the first place, not copy them because it happens to be a part of some dataset, but IANAL.

I can see this being a pretty terrible tool for doxxing.

"This contract contains all your private information, embarrassing life stories and more. Pay $100 per month or decryption key will be released." ?

Blackmail is certainly a concern, but even garden variety harassment would be made far more harmful by the inability to have it removed.

It calls into question the very idea of "illegal content."

If you think about it, what does it mean that content is illegal? How can you forbid a set of ones and zeroes?

It's a fake idea we've invented, and new technology has a way of forcing us to realize that.

That said, practically, the world will adapt however it adapts. If we can survive the advent of unbreakable encryption, a little trolling won't matter much.

> How can you forbid a set of ones and zeroes?

This is like asking, "How can you forbid a set of iron atoms?" in reference to guns.

Yes. And that leads straight to the question of morals and ethics, which the courts of every country are built around.

Guns can cause harm. Does information?

If someone photographs your private life and makes it public, that could be called information. But it's not quite the same: That's an action that goes against your will, and it seems quite ethical to let you enforce it.

Yet even still, how do you propose to do that? What happens when a service literally cannot delete the information? And when that service becomes crucial infrastructure, what then?

These are questions that technology is going to force us to address. Pretending that it's naive won't change that. Decentralization is coming.

Speech is far more dangerous than guns which is why the second amendment came second. With a gun you can shoot dozens, maybe hundreds of people. A charismatic speaker can cause megadeaths and will, sooner or later, cause gigadeaths.

Like information, guns may cause harm. It sounds like you're looking for an absolute definition of illegal. I don't believe that exists given the evolving nature of law and society. Bottom line: information, content, or whatever you want to call it can be illegal, regardless of the elements that make up its physical form. Who is liable in the chain of creation and distribution of the content may be debated.

Fine; corrected. I grew up with guns, so I didn't mean anything by it.

To your edit, you're just punting the question. What do you do when the information cannot be removed, and the service is critical infrastructure? What happens when the content is in a decentralized internet that everyone uses, and that everyone receives automatically?

You can punish the uploader, sure. But do you ban the service? You'll take part of your population with it. Most countries seem to agree that banning Bitcoin is a bad idea, for example.

So what do you propose?

> So what do you propose?

I'd do what we do with every advancement that challenges are existing paradigms: study it, debate it, and seek out creative and equitable ways to deter the negative externalities. That may involve banning, restricting or regulating services.

> What do you do when the information cannot be removed, and the service is critical infrastructure? What happens when the content is in a decentralized internet that everyone uses, and that everyone receives automatically?

Even in this scenario, there is still going to be a common denominator that can be regulated to control illegal content (ISPs for example).

Even in this scenario, there is still going to be a common denominator that can be regulated to control illegal content (ISPs for example).

Imagine that Bitcoin's genesis block contained an encrypted image. Satoshi today releases the key, and it turns out to be the worst image imaginable. BTC doesn't drop; the price keeps going up over time. What do you do?

If you have an answer, it would be an important one.

If what you’re getting at is does raw information in and of itself cause harm? No, but I would argue that information can directly cause harm when learned, which is the only way information is used (information has no meaning if it cannot be applied and learned). Example: learning the information that a loved one has passed can cause a person harm.

It can cause negative feelings, sure. But is that the same as causing harm?

I mean this quite seriously: Should feelings alone be enshrined and protected? It's a strange question with no clear answers.

Note that grief can directly cause harm and can kill.

To take it to a logical extreme: using this argument you can say that calling digital child porn photos illegal because they are just ones and zeros is silly, which is obviously not true. Illegal content is not a “fake” idea, even it it’s used in bad ways by bad actors. Ones and zeros aren’t illegal because numbers aren’t illegal, but it’s the arrangement of those ones and zeros, the context, that is key.

Everyone is doing their best to wriggle their way away from this question, but I'm going to force you to address it:

What happens when everyone automatically receives all content, and the content cannot be deleted? Now assume the service is something everyone uses. Imagine it's a decentralized internet, and banning it will cause your country to fall behind. What do you do then?

This isn't quite a baseless hypothetical. It's one logical outcome of decentralization. And sooner or later, we're going to need to answer these hard questions.

Before I can answer that question, how would you force everyone to receive all content, and force them to ingest it? Being decentralized doesn’t imply you receive all content.

Let's just say we're lucky Bitcoin wasn't built with an image renderer from the very beginning.

But that's also an answer to your question. It's easy to imagine if Bitcoin were. So let's say it was. What do you do now that Bitcoin is $6k?

(It's easy to argue that Bitcoin may not have attained $6k if it embedded an image renderer. But I think a future service will attain the same importance.)

That's a very naive view. While illegal content might "only" get you incarcerated in most of the western world, it will get you straight up killed in a lot of the other countries.

This doesn't stop just because the technology is unable to delete anything.

It does stop. When a technology becomes important, countries who forbid that technology miss out. The tech migrates elsewhere, taking talent with it. How many times have we seen that pattern?

You can try to make Ethereum illegal if you want, but it'd be a tactical mistake. Ditto for unbreakable encryption.

In fact, explain why it makes no sense to make unbreakable encryption illegal. Show your work. I suspect the same argument you'd use for that will apply to this.

Required reading: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

It's not a fake idea. There's all kinds of illegal content. The encoding is irrelevant.

> How can you forbid a set of ones and zeroes?

The courts seem to think they can make some numbers illegal: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

this is reads silly if you don't ignore this is just a new implementation of an old concept.

its similar to hearing how banal things are now uncertain because a computer was involved at some point.

you always could store plain text in block chains. why would it change anything if it's now wrapped into a image board shell?

likewise, there was p2p and cache layers since forever. why now this should be treated as something else?

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