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Comment by uup | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the Treasury will ever go after people running Eth validators. Storage on blockchain, thus far, has been too expensive to store significant amounts of copyrighted material. But you have to wonder what would happen if the blockchain stored serious amounts of material that was illegal in some form, e.g. currency from a sanctioned system like Tornado Cash or a collection of Disney movies.

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The information on the blockchain is not illegal. It is not illegal to store the sanctioned addresses or tornaco cash smart contract source code. What is illegal is spending those funds, or allowing customers to transact with them. In fact, you need the addresses and contract details to block those transactions.

Copyrighted material on blockchain has been discussed many times, it is just not viable attack because blockchain space is crazy expensive. There has been various data uploaded to the blockchain but you also need scripts to extract that data, so it also raises the question if that is even that accessible data.

> The information on the blockchain is not illegal.

Validators aren't just storing the information. They're actively processing transactions and getting paid to do it.

> Copyrighted material on blockchain has been discussed many times, it is just not viable attack because blockchain space is crazy expensive.

That's not a very satisfying conclusion to the topic

A random internet search implied a 20KiB image would be $1k-5k.

That’s expensive, but not impossible for a stunt.

Nevermind copyrighted material, what would happen if you got child porn on there?

There is already child sexual abuse material stored on the Bitcoin blockchain[0], and no enforcement actions have been taken as a result.

[0]: https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf

It looks like those are only links to content hosted elsewhere. I think directly storing images would be a lot more severe.

The paper’s authors indicate that there is one image that is arguably CSAM (in addition to the hundreds of links to what is definitely CSAM): “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).”

I imagine this should be legislated similarly to utilities. The phone company isn't responsible when someone discusses a crime over the phone.

I'm not sure this is a good parallel, both because the blockchain itself isn't an entity which can be made responsible, only users of it, and also because a discussion over the phone isn't copyright material being hosted. I suspect nodes serving the blockchain could be made liable similar to torrent peers.

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