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.
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.
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.
In the old days it was unfathomable you could be locked up for something you didn't know was a crime.
This pretty much has never been true, at least in Germany. "Unwissenheit schützt vor Strafe nicht". Even the Roman Law didn't excuse for lack of knowledge https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignorantia_legis_non_excusat
There are edge cases where you may escape punishment (Verbotsirrtum) but only if it was unavoidable that you erred. Involuntarily distributing child porn may carry lesser punishment, but it will certainly be investigate unless you can assert a privilege such as common carrier status or inability to control the transmission, as for example Tor nodes could.
Not incompatible at all. Most criminal laws actually have a mens rea requirement.
No I am making the very simple case that a number is a number and you can't make a number illegal.
All digital information is numbers and banning any of the 4 horsemen of the infocalypse at mere possession will ensure we retard most useful technologies.
The only time that flesh space laws should apply is when flesh space actions are taken.
An example: terrorist training material is sent on how to build a bomb. Until a bomb is built, or a conspiracy to build a bomb is made, nothing illegal should have happened.
You can obviously have a contract between two people for sending digital information between them.
That this only happens in digital space does not mean the contract can't or shouldn't be enforced.
How can an element or a wster-based solution be illegal?
This is one thing that most of the free world has gotten mostly right: you can say anything you want in writing without having to fear the government.
It needs some corner cases ironed out, obviously, but for the most part you can write whatever you want and not be arrested for it.
But simply having a written text, drawn picture, photograph or a video should never be illegal in itself.
Exactly! However, reality is very sad.
A map could potentially get you in prison in India https://archive.fo/nLtJX
> The draft bill says: “No person shall depict, disseminate, publish or distribute any wrong or false topographic information of India including international boundaries through internet platforms or online services in any electronic or physical form.” The maximum penalty for wrongly depicting the map will be a fine of Rs1bn ($15m) and imprisonment for up to seven years.
If you have naked images of your ex-partner, they don't magically become revenge porn until the moment you share them without permission(at which point it's a crime and it's already punishable by existing laws).
Sharing MP3s? It's just a number.
Sending death threats? Just a number.
Directing relatives to the money drop so they may get their loved one back? Just a number.
Maybe the act in itself wasn't even illegal. But publication may still be. I can have your consent to record, but not to publish. Should we just accept that the publication was illegal, but once-breached, further publication is legal?
So if I want to air something, I publish it anonymously and can then freely refer to it? A lot of laws would have to be rewritten for this to work. Privacy laws and copyright laws among them.
What you lack is a program to decode them consistently (I hope).
You can read digital information in any way you please. An image is fundamentally two numbers that give you the height and width and a bunch of number triplets that give you the color values for the pixels inside. You can always find a transformation from any number to any image given you allow the transformation function to be odd enough.
To put it simply, you sound like this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VB3uQHa14g
When trying to outlaw some numbers in some situations.
Interestingly, it's a distinction that happens to more-or-less match our own intuitions about the situation, which is something interesting to ruminate about a bit.
>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.
[1] https://steemit.com/ethereum/@titusfrost/ethereum-s-vitalik-...
> 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?
I've memed this online and to friends. It doesn't help that one Ethereum Foundation member was celebrating on twitter about how esoteric people are in the EF even saying that there are oculist members.
Not much you can do about it anyway.
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.
In this case, you have an idea that child porn is illegal, but you had no idea it was coming through your blockchain.
Those are very different cases.
- 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.
2. The problem is a technical one as a result of a blockchain allowing content other than financial transactions to be a part of the record.
Maybe I am misunderstanding the process.
But there has to he some kind of centralized group that bless the new block. Also, a new client and miner software must be released. Perhaps a new version every time an illegal item is included, or perhaps the program can check the list automatically in a website. In both case, it will break the decentralization.