My immediate thought is that this can be abused: to store revenge porn, inflammatory comments, defamation, and so on, in a way that is more "permanent" than the way this stuff is usually stored online.
Is that a valid concern, or no?
Is that a valid concern, or no?
CSAM links are there too.[1]
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/rbxupy/tankman_ima...
[1]
> Bitcoin’s blockchain contains at least eight files with sexual content. While five files only show, describe, or link to mildly pornographic content, we consider the remaining three instances objectionable for almost all jurisdictions: Two of them are backups of link lists to child pornography, containing 274 links to websites, 142 of which refer to Tor hidden services. The remaining instance is 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 (due to ethical concerns we refrain from providing a citation). Notably, two of the explicit images were only detected by our suspicious transaction detector, i.e., they were not inserted via known services.
https://thedefiant.io/tiananmen-contract-on-bsc-seeking-to-p...
That or "pretend" communicating as a CIA spook, pushing weapons into china, contacting his contact. Hope they invite those crooks to drink tea..
I'm not sure "abused" is the correct term, though. It's an immutable data store, like IPFS with a server in a jurisdiction you don't control. It stores data.
Is it "abusing" ext4 if you use it to store a movie rip?
It's also worth thinking about how this is used in the context of leaking data. Imagine if instead of posting Jennifer Lawrence's nudes on reddit, hackers had put them on the blockchain and just told people it was there. You now have an immutable copy of those photos stuck in a billion dollar speculative asset.
It was, however, designed to be uncensorable. Your second sentence there is - well, indeed. It _is_.
[0] https://www.wired.com/2013/07/snowden-dead-mans-switch/
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/58nn58/what_h...
To me that sounds beneficial. I'd do it myself if I had some blackmail on someone!
For example it is trivially easy to film the TV at a bar, then tweet out the video of a sports game - millions do it every day. But if a company did that without the rights and earned money from it - an easy lawsuit.
I guess that the penalties could be correspondingly high - like the difference between rendering someone temporarily unconscious versus killing them ?
Immutable data is almost never a good idea in practice.
[0] https://book.keybase.io/docs/server/merkle-root-in-bitcoin-b...
[1] https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_stell...
What's that? It's impossible to take down a block without messing up the entire blockchain? Well maybe Mr. Bitcoin should have thought of that when making the data so disturbingly entangled!
I can only imagine the cost to do that
would you personally enjoy taking orders from China, or whoever the next global hegemon happens to be?
Isn't it great to have some very remote and entirely unaccountable overlord telling you what to do, and then prosecute you criminally on a whim?
Sounds like utopia.
In any case I explicitly said within their jurisdiction. Meaning you'd go after the nodes in your country or with agreements in place. For example there was a news story the other day about miners maybe setting up in Texas (despite the creaking grid) they'd probably be vulnerable to enforcement of things like the DMCA.
america should stop doing that.
1. It's only theorized that pi has this property.
2. Storing the starting index of the digit would likely be larger than any computer right now can hold, and possibly bigger than the estimated number atoms in the universe.
3. What a judge cares about is that you used the number with the intention of accessing the file, not the particular sleight of hand method by which you accessed it. If you cheekily share your favorite number that just so happens to be the starting digit index for "Limp Bizkit - Nookie.mp3", that's what the judge cares about. No need to outlaw pi, no need to outlaw numbers, it's all about intent. That's why they're called judges. They judge people and their intentions.
X = . 1 10 11 100 101 110 111 0000 0001 ...
(the binary version of Champernowne's constant [1]) but the index at which any pattern occurs takes more bits to write than that pattern itself, and the same would hold (on average) for patterns in pi, assuming it actually is normal.
Show me the digits of pi that contain the image of Nelson Mandela that is as easy to find as the one described in this article.
Show me a way to take any random arbitrary image and find it's corresponding representation in pi that is as easy as encoding that same image into the blockchain.
So, one could in theory create a list of primes (or perfect powers) populated them with hidden content using the aforesaid method and claim they are only a list of primes (or perfect powers).