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.
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.
I'm reading this charitably as you saying that laws that criminalise distribution regardless of intent or knowledge need to be changed to recognise that with the internet people can effectively commit crimes without knowledge or intent. This is particularly relevant where distribution of material (child porn, terrorist material) is criminalised.
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.
Your comment really shows how far we've slid away from the Mens Rea requirement in law. It used to be that every major crime required an intent component. Where the crime was serious enough we had lesser punishments where there was no intent (e.g. manslaughter vs murder).
In the old days it was unfathomable you could be locked up for something you didn't know was a crime.
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.
> 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.
Not incompatible at all. Most criminal laws actually have a mens rea requirement.
>I'm reading this charitably as you saying that laws that criminalise distribution regardless of intent or knowledge need to be changed to recognise that with the internet people can effectively commit crimes without knowledge or intent. This is particularly relevant where distribution of material (child porn, terrorist material) is criminalised.
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.
Wouldn't that make cyberbullying and slander even in its most extreme forms legal? In those cases often someone is being harmed (with real, flesh space consequences), despite the material being nothing more then numbers.
Note that we only need one number to capture all possible finite content (i.e., the number is chosen such that all binary strings will appear somewhere in the binary representation of the number). A "normal number" [1] satisfies this property. And it is believed that Pi is a normal number.
I know it's controversial, but I think simply having any information should never be illegal - be it a manual on building bombs, detailed plans of the white house or yes, child porn. Obviously production of such material should be completely 10000% illegal, but we already have laws that cover this extensively.
But simply having a written text, drawn picture, photograph or a video should never be illegal in itself.
> 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.
India has active border disputes with both Pakistan and China. The concern is that if an Indian publisher produces maps which don't show the disputed areas as part of India then that would hurt their legal case in international tribunals and hand a propaganda victory to the other side. Land is the foundation of the state so it's not surprising that some governments react harshly to something their leaders perceive as an existential threat.
I see a lot of confusion around this topic - sharing porn images without the person's consent should always remain illegal. But just the fact that you have some images on your hard drive? That shouldn't be a crime in itself.
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).
Sure, but that's not the argument I am making, so perhaps you are replying to the wrong person. I agree that all information is "just a number" and you can outlaw numbers - but I can totally see why sharing certain information would be illegal(as in - the act of sharing). These two are not mutually exclusive.
Digital depictions of illegal acts in real life should remain legal, and illegal acts in real life should also remain illegal. I think that's the best way to resolve this.
What if one's classmates trade photographs of one getting raped? Maybe you would accept this based on your principles. But do you also demand that everybody else accepts this?
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.
You already have hundreds of gigabytes of child porn on your computer.
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.
Using logic similar to chapter six of https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf , though, you can still draw a meaningful distinction between a normal JPG decoder, and your proposed JPG decoder that interprets the Declaration of Independence as illegal child porn. Your decoder must inevitably have a much higher information content in it, and is a "reduction doing all the work" in that case. So while you've got a mathematical point (no sarcasm, I understand what you are getting at), even on purely mathematical grounds I can argue a meaningful distinction; legally it'll be even easier.
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.
You are extremely hostile and unhelpful in this discussion.
If you want to drag discourse down there are a lot of other forums where one line replies signaling you know something profound without actually saying anything are acceptable.
Asking that bits meet some simple predefined function isn't hard. In his example simply demanding that along with the substance you are provided a signed copy of the ph value would mean that bits without color give us all the information we need, given the physical limitations of the universe as we understand it.
Intent isn't. But intent has nothing to do with the bits either. Which has been my point from the start: no digital information should be a priori illegal.
On the edit: I finished it before your post. I'm not sure how long a line took to write, but I suspect it was way less than the time needed to refresh the thread.
The paper says that the bitcoin blockchain already contains illegal content. In particular copyrighted material and possible child pornography. More precisely:
>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.
There was a tweet [1] from Vitalik Buterin on this exact topic. He was arguing that „possession“ (as in data on the blockchain) does not impose risks on others. Tweet was removed quickly.
> This entire Ethereum to me wreaks of New World Order involvement, just look at the members of the Ethereum Alliance.
> 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.
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.
> What will a country do if someone embeds child pornography or a picture of Mohammed or something in the blockchain?
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.
Well it depends. If blockchain stored on disk directly contains knows know illegal content it will be picked up by some scanners used by law enforcement. Just like pirated software it won't be enough on it's own but might be a good leverage in the original case that caused computer hardware seizure.
- 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.
I think it will not be a 'denial-of-service' attack but a 'denial-of-decentralization' attack. You can modify an old block and skip all the signatures calculation if everyone agree to take the last block as valid in spite it has a broken chain of calculations. Somewhat similar to the ETH/ETC hard fork.
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.
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.