The author doesn't touch enough on just how much social damage can come from this feature. Permanent ostracism, shunning, blackmail, lower pay, and so on. People love judging and hating on other people when they can point fingers while hiding their own malfeasance. Certain things will show up while others won't in a model where we try to blockchain everything. The idea that they'll evolve some form of forgiveness instead runs contrary to how human nature has played out so far.
Now, one might argue the benefits outweigh the harm. That would be a different discussion even though the article does list some of them. It gives a start on it.
Feedback systems are much better reward than risk. They prevent much more harm than they cause. They are one of the best replacements for use of force to encourage honorable action. Technology is almost always a net win.
To my knowledge, the scenario hasn't happened in real life yet but it's a thought experiment that tests (abuses) the permanence of an un-erasable consensus ledger. I will try to use the most distasteful data I can think of to drive the point home...
Imagine that a vindictive person embeds the bytes of a graphic explicit child rape video into the ledger. All subsequent blocks will depend on those "bad bytes" so they can't be erased. For the later blocks to be trusted, everyone must have a copy of those bytes.
What is society's response? Live with those bad blocks to maintain the trust in the chain? Or does a majority agree to fork a new chain (ala Ethereum/DAO) that removes the bad bytes?
Even if a fork happens, the trolling/defacing of bad bytes into the worldwide blockchain is a tempting method to force everyone to have a copy of your "graffiti". The new fork would simply be a new target to deface. A smaller example of "bad bytes" is doxing someone's Social Security # or home address. (For all we know, some of the transaction amounts in some Bitcoin blocks may represent "bad bytes" but nobody has made the knowledge public yet to ruin a person's life. E.g. Bitcoin block #403891 has Jennifer Lawrence's SSN#.)
In essence, the permanence of the block chain can be used as a weapon against it. It doesn't mean the blockchain concept is unusable but there doesn't seem to be an easy computer-science answer for it.
I've definitely read about someone putting some extremely illegal data in the Bitcoin blockchain. I'd rather not go searching for it to confirm though.
Yes, if it's illegal data like the DVD encryption key[1] embedded into Bitcoin, that's the kind of "bad bytes" that doesn't pressure the community to suppress it. If the past behavior in the Digg fiasco is an indication, illegal data like that permanently etched into a blockchain would be celebrated.
Evil and horror will always be just around the corner if you wish to see it. Trying to cripple technology to force forgetfulness upon people is pretty immoral. I mean, if remembering things is crime, then thought crime is illegal, yes? How would Kim Jong-un regulate your blockchain thoughts. Free speech good. Censorship bad.
>Evil and horror will always be just around the corner if you wish to see it.
I think for the average person who doesn't use Tor, they will not stumble across child rape videos with a search for keywords "child rape videos" in Google or Bing.
However, if it's embedded in a global blockchain where the end user must have a copy of those illegal bytes for the blockchain to be verified & trusted, does that mean every blockchain user is committing a crime by storing bytes of child pornography? If someone wanted to sabotage a blockchain, it's hard to think of a better way to deface it.
You probably shouldn't be searching for that. To be free of all reminders that crimes have been committed, think of all the people that would have to die. Perhaps crimes should be punished more effectively instead of trying to get meta-crime to do the work. For instance, money laundering is mostly used to just add years to peoples normal crime sentences. You could just increase the normal crime sentence. Imagine how violent the USA would be right now if violent video games caused violence. The violent gaming industry has more revenue than the movie industry. Metacrime enforcement takes money from real crime enforcement.
That response doesn't engage with the difficult scenario I laid out. To restate: If you want a law-abiding-wouldn't-hurt-a-fly citizen to participate in the blockchain, the citizen must copy the illegal child pornography to his harddrive to satisfy the functionality of the blockchain. The citizen is not "searching for it"; instead, the citizen must have it.
Right, but just because its there doesn't mean its really there. If someone embeds a video in the blockchain, most people wouldn't see it unless they specifically went looking for what block number it is in, and then got a program to copy data out of the blockchain and into a video file, and then ran it with a video player. That fits my definition of searching for it.
Child porn possession, unlike most crimes, is intentless.
Even if someone has no knowledge of, or intent related to, the possession of child porn, it's still illegal.
A person who downloads that video unknowingly via the blockchain is probably morally in the clear, however they're very much not in the clear with the law.
Given that technology requires users, and users are bound by these "pesky" things called laws, I think that it is definitely a problem with the technology if the blockchain (or other system) can be so poisoned that all users of it would be rendered criminals.
I guess it's a great opportunity to roll back thought crime that you perform with your eyes. You're already in possession of things illegal in China, North Korea, etc. Less meta-crime enforcement, more real crime enforcement.
Most people already have no clue what they have on their machines. And no clue how to find stuff. I mean, consider how images can be embedded in other images through steganography.
For some extra twists, contemplate one-time-pad encryption.
You can claim that some random set of data on someone's machine is an encrypted child porno video, and provide a "key" that would decrypt it.
Try explaining why that's not real to a clueless judge.
Anyway, i hope the legal system would recognize the difference between having intent to store cp and not having such intent. Otherwise anyone can be made or proven to have stored it.
> Try explaining why that's not real to a clueless judge.
Judges aren't stupid. You can easily explain why the random data isn't something. You can't explain your way out of unencrypted data being objectively there.
> Anyway, i hope the legal system would recognize the difference between having intent to store cp and not having such intent.
If you know how blockchains work, then it is intentional.
> Otherwise anyone can be made or proven to have stored it.
I don't think you understand what money laundering is. It is lying to the government about the source of your income, to clean your money. It is a completely separate act than the original crime (bank robbery, drug dealing, etc.) that produced the money, and should be treated differently. Also, making money laundering illegal means we can punish the middlemen who enable those crimes by facilitating the money laundering. By providing an easy avenue for criminals to wash their money, they make it easier for people to profit from a criminal enterprise, even though they did not actively participate.
I think it should be just as OK as owning and sharing videos of death, murders and of adult people being raped. There is no reason why CP should be better or worse in the eyes of law.
(not justifying CP, just saying that it's just as bad as the above)
I don't see how it is different from it being posted anywhere else on the internet.
I.e. yesterday i embedded an innocuous message into Bitcoin's blockchain. Can you see it? I doubt it, unless you are willing to go through and decode some hundreds of thousands of recent transactions.
Conceptually, it's the same as posting a link like dg251kctuhnoj3f4.onion/timmy_suffers_part_1.avi - unless you are actively looking for the bad bytes or have a link sent to you, you are unlikely to find them.
Thus, no need for forks or any extra drastic actions.
And then what of the right to be forgotten? What if an EU court orders forking immediately prior to the negative material (fact or libel)? The order applies only to blockchain hosts in the court's jurisdiction, but very quickly which fork is canonical? One on the moon or in orbit? It seems like a consequence is centralization, and at that point it's a sitting duck to use of force, manipulation or destruction.
So how does a decentralized system avoid the (seemingly) inevitable pressure/threat to centralize?
You don't need a blockchain for this. A commit to the Linux kernel, once accepted, practically will never be removed from history, since it's been copied so widely and would require so many people to agree.
And isn't this also how ordinary accounting systems work?
The place where it breaks down is that Bitcoin is for anonymous people who don't trust each other. With fraud there is no forgiveness.
In many other systems, people are not anonymous and mistaken transactions can be reversed, using the court system if it comes to that.
You don't always have to remove something, you just need to introduce doubt. It only took x% industry shills to make any evidence for climate change effectively disappear for a lot of people.
The difference is Linus won't take your arbitrary data and persist it in the kernel's history and Bitcoin will for a small amount of money. This makes some interesting schemes possible to implement: timestamping, proof-of-existence and similar services. For example Keybase.io uses Bitcoin like that to prove that are not messing with people's data [0]. Another interesting use is creating virtual tokens via Counter Party [1].
If you don't want to pay you also "abuse" Certificate Transparency logs to do basically the same job, just like Mozilla with their Binary Transparency [2].
What if you hide very small images of bad things inside high res photos, say, in the reflections in eyes. What about in frames of movies? What if you use Steganography to hide bad things in friendly, popular images, then publish the key? What if you just spam an evil image to everyone's email? Hide it in frames of a gif?
By this logic, we must all stop all communications, for communicating can be evil. Good bye first amendment.
Well, there are people in jail whose Freenet nodes handled child porn. I suspect that some of them are innocent. But they couldn't afford to hire expert witnesses, to counter bogus testimony about attribution in Freenet. So they settled. So much for plausible deniability.
Blockchains are forgotten just as easily as any other data if the last backup is lost.
Proof-of-work, however, makes it expensive to modify history. But it doesn't change the fact that, in order to prevent data loss, the only solution is backups at multiple, independent locations.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 88.1 ms ] threadNow, one might argue the benefits outweigh the harm. That would be a different discussion even though the article does list some of them. It gives a start on it.
Imagine that a vindictive person embeds the bytes of a graphic explicit child rape video into the ledger. All subsequent blocks will depend on those "bad bytes" so they can't be erased. For the later blocks to be trusted, everyone must have a copy of those bytes.
What is society's response? Live with those bad blocks to maintain the trust in the chain? Or does a majority agree to fork a new chain (ala Ethereum/DAO) that removes the bad bytes?
Even if a fork happens, the trolling/defacing of bad bytes into the worldwide blockchain is a tempting method to force everyone to have a copy of your "graffiti". The new fork would simply be a new target to deface. A smaller example of "bad bytes" is doxing someone's Social Security # or home address. (For all we know, some of the transaction amounts in some Bitcoin blocks may represent "bad bytes" but nobody has made the knowledge public yet to ruin a person's life. E.g. Bitcoin block #403891 has Jennifer Lawrence's SSN#.)
In essence, the permanence of the block chain can be used as a weapon against it. It doesn't mean the blockchain concept is unusable but there doesn't seem to be an easy computer-science answer for it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...
I think for the average person who doesn't use Tor, they will not stumble across child rape videos with a search for keywords "child rape videos" in Google or Bing.
However, if it's embedded in a global blockchain where the end user must have a copy of those illegal bytes for the blockchain to be verified & trusted, does that mean every blockchain user is committing a crime by storing bytes of child pornography? If someone wanted to sabotage a blockchain, it's hard to think of a better way to deface it.
That response doesn't engage with the difficult scenario I laid out. To restate: If you want a law-abiding-wouldn't-hurt-a-fly citizen to participate in the blockchain, the citizen must copy the illegal child pornography to his harddrive to satisfy the functionality of the blockchain. The citizen is not "searching for it"; instead, the citizen must have it.
Even if someone has no knowledge of, or intent related to, the possession of child porn, it's still illegal.
A person who downloads that video unknowingly via the blockchain is probably morally in the clear, however they're very much not in the clear with the law.
You can claim that some random set of data on someone's machine is an encrypted child porno video, and provide a "key" that would decrypt it.
Try explaining why that's not real to a clueless judge.
Anyway, i hope the legal system would recognize the difference between having intent to store cp and not having such intent. Otherwise anyone can be made or proven to have stored it.
Judges aren't stupid. You can easily explain why the random data isn't something. You can't explain your way out of unencrypted data being objectively there.
> Anyway, i hope the legal system would recognize the difference between having intent to store cp and not having such intent.
If you know how blockchains work, then it is intentional.
> Otherwise anyone can be made or proven to have stored it.
Not for any real standard of proof.
It's simply not an easy question to give an easy answer to.
(not justifying CP, just saying that it's just as bad as the above)
I.e. yesterday i embedded an innocuous message into Bitcoin's blockchain. Can you see it? I doubt it, unless you are willing to go through and decode some hundreds of thousands of recent transactions.
For anyone to notice, i'll have to post a link - https://bitaps.com/97804baa2ce19454c61eeda3de1bb99fc6b005f8a...
Conceptually, it's the same as posting a link like dg251kctuhnoj3f4.onion/timmy_suffers_part_1.avi - unless you are actively looking for the bad bytes or have a link sent to you, you are unlikely to find them.
Thus, no need for forks or any extra drastic actions.
It removes all of the below and then some.
"That never happened.
Forget I said that.
Can we start again?
I’m just going to pretend you didn’t just say that."
So how does a decentralized system avoid the (seemingly) inevitable pressure/threat to centralize?
And isn't this also how ordinary accounting systems work?
The place where it breaks down is that Bitcoin is for anonymous people who don't trust each other. With fraud there is no forgiveness.
In many other systems, people are not anonymous and mistaken transactions can be reversed, using the court system if it comes to that.
You don't always have to remove something, you just need to introduce doubt. It only took x% industry shills to make any evidence for climate change effectively disappear for a lot of people.
If you don't want to pay you also "abuse" Certificate Transparency logs to do basically the same job, just like Mozilla with their Binary Transparency [2].
[0]: https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/merkle_root_in_bitco...
[1]: https://counterparty.io/
[2]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Binary_Transparency
By this logic, we must all stop all communications, for communicating can be evil. Good bye first amendment.
Proof-of-work, however, makes it expensive to modify history. But it doesn't change the fact that, in order to prevent data loss, the only solution is backups at multiple, independent locations.