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Comment by jameslevy | Hacker News Reader

I believe that censorship resistance is a key value proposition for decentralized file storage. So its agnostic handling of illegal content is a feature, not a bug.

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In the spirit of blockchain and decentralization, I think you're right. But practically, explaining that to the authorities will probably not be a pleasant experience if they manage to find cp or other illegal data on your hard drive.

The data is encrypted by the client, so that's theoretically impossible. Neither you nor the authorities have the ability to determine what file fragments (whole flies aren't stored; just fragments) are on your PC.

It's not theoretically impossible for law enforcement to discover the encryption keys to some illegal files on someone's computer. Then they could go around arresting people who host the chunks. Of course those people wouldn't have known about those files in particular, but they were knowingly running software that enables hosting illegal files. A judge would have to decide if that's OK.

Doesn't AWS also have the same problem? Someone could upload encrypted illegal content, then later law enforcement could discover the key. Why hasn't AWS gotten in trouble for that yet?

No large cloud provider allows anonymous usage. They take down content on request and assist law enforcement in catching the non-anonymous people doing illegal things on their platforms.

Okay, bad example. AWS is a paid service so obviously they have more information about their users than most. What about Dropbox or OneDrive? Both of those services allow files to be stored and shared with no requirement to identify yourself when you're creating an account, beyond providing an email address.

Both Dropbox and OneDrive scan your content to determine if it matches known illegal content (be it illegal pornography, DRM content, etc) and will remove it and remove you from their service.

See https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/photodna

If someone pre-encrypts data and then uploads that to Dropbox, it gets more complicated and AFAIK involves more of monitoring the IP addresses that things are coming from and/or being shared to.

Same argument for Bitcoin, cash etc. You have a thousand degrees of slippery slope in what constitutes "enable". Does paying your workers in cash for tips enable tax evasion?

Also, I'm not sure what scenario in which you would be able to find the encryption key, yet not have access to the wallet controlling the contracts? Even if you did, I'm not sure why hosts could not assist in cancelling contracts in a similar fashion to cloud providers taking down content on request.

US has strong third party protection laws. If it doesn't, HN could be held accountable for illegal files that were converted to base64 and then posted in the comments.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but as a third party you are not responsible for illegal data uploaded to your server/machine so long as you are not aware that it is illegal data. Once you are informed that there is illegal data on your machine, you have 24 hours to remove it.

Someone could upload data to you then later reveal the keys. If the authorities have the metadata and keys they can determine who is storing the data.

So basically Jeffrey Epstein gives you a CD full of encrypted files and asks you to hold on to them for him? Shouldn't be any problem with that.

I wonder about whether it's right to be renting your storage space away without knowing what it's being used for. I don't want to directly contribute toward bad things happening.

We need to move away from centralised internet.

You don't have any real proof that Company XYZ aren't using your money to do bad things.

You would stop participating if it turned out the Sia network was mostly used for bad things. In the same vein, you may choose not to use Amazon because it is unfairly treating warehouse workers.

It's fine then because you'd only be indirectly contributing. Just like paying your taxes or buying fast food and clothes.

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