Bitcoin's blockchain: Potentially a hazardous waste dump of child abuse, malware, etc Bitcoin's blockchain can be loaded with sensitive, unlawful or malicious data, raising potential legal problems in most of the world, according to boffins based in Germany. In a paper [PDF] presented at the Financial Cryptography and Data Security conference on the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao – "A Quantitative Analysis …
We're at the harsh tail-end of winter, and those guys land a presentation at a conference in Curacao...
Quite pleasantly subtropical Curacao... That is really not known for anything IT-ish....at all...
Something tells me the organisers and participants are at least ..familiar with Simon's work...
When Picasso lived in Paris shortly after 1900 he was too poor to pay his restaurant bills. But his talent was recognized and on several occasions he took a 5 Francs note, scribbled on it, signed it and the value jumped to 50 Francs, enough to pay the waiter. If it would survive to the present day it could be auctioned for millions even if it had accummulated a thick layer of shit.
Crime is fairly well defined in most countries. All Interpol is is a glorified secretariat, so whilst being on a wanted list because you've upset Putin is inconvenient it doesn't magically project Russian criminal law onto any other country.
Which is why Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun are still free.
I'm surprised this is only coming up now, considering it's been talked about for almost as long as it's been possible to encode arbitrary data into bitcoin's blockchain.
What surprises me is that none has been found yet. Embedding illegal material should be a perfect way to get bitcoin banned anywhere you like.
I do remember that a few years ago the bitcoin blockchain triggered a false positive in some AV software.
"What surprises me is that none has been found yet. Embedding illegal material should be a perfect way to get bitcoin banned anywhere you like."
If you read the article, you'll note that the entire point is that it has been found. This is not theoretical; there are links to child abuse images in the Bitcoin blockchain.
However, that does raise an important point that the article doesn't really discuss - having a link to something buried in some code that user may not even have a way to access is not the same as actually having the material itself on your PC. It's not the material itself, and it's not a standard html link that anyone could click on, it requires knowing how to dig around in the blockchain for it, as well as knowing where to find it in the first place. No sane court could consider an unwitting Bitcoin user guilty of child pornography just because they have a copy of the blockchain. While the idea that some countries might use it as an excuse to either ban Bitcoin or go after users, those aren't the sort of countries that would generally worry about having an excuse to do so.
Blockchains are a decentralized way of distributing tamper-proof data. Any data. Cryptocurrency ledgers, software licenses, whatever.
Nothing special here about Bitcoin or about blockchains. Lots of applications use blockchains. They are not new.
The only surprising thing here is that someone wants to distribute tamper-proof malware or child porn.
But look on the bright side: they're cryptographically signed, so once someone catches up with them it'll be simple enough to prove who released the stuff into the wilds.
This is all a blinding glimpse of the obvious. [yawn]
What better way to store illegal material than to secrete it within a popular block chain? That way one does not have to hold it oneself, other participants in the block chain (miners, exchanges) are doing that for you, indeed have a monetary interest in doing that for you even though the material itself could cause them to wind up in jail.
Better still if one were to encrypt the material before placing it within the block chain, it's then even less likely that it'll raise any interest whatsoever beyond people being irritated that they're storing content in the first place.
One result of high rates of taxation on moderately salaried people is that they dream up schemes to make the cost of their vacation tax deductible.
What they forget is that these conferences attract the kind of people one wishes to avoid anywhere, let alone on holiday. They deserve each other.
Probably a reference to the current shortage of high end gaming GPUs caused by the crypto-bubble making small-scale mining of "ASIC-resistant" coins such as ethereum quite lucrative once again.
It really has become quite ridiculous. It's like bitcoin's GPU era all over again, but this time everyone knows about it so demand is through the roof and so are prices.
Stand by for the flood of (ab)used GPUs on ebay when the bubble bursts though...
"Stand by for the flood of (ab)used GPUs on ebay when the bubble bursts though..."
But that has already happened. The last couple of big BTC price drops (9k euro to 6k) resulted in similar drops in the price of alt coins, and the alt coin price stayed the same while BTC recovered.
So something like a 1060 was making about 2-3 euro a day now makes a bit under a euro.
Therefore there *should* be a flood of 1060s and 470/570 second hand cards.
With the exception of the fans, a second hand GTX mining card should be in better condition that one used for gaming. You can't fuck with the BIOS on it*, it'll generally have been run about 65% power at about 90% of it's max settings, and it will generally have been well ventilated. Gamers will often run a card to max conditions, in a closed case, with no regard for any stat other than the faps :)
I'd be wary of second hand ATI cards, since you can modify the BIOS on those without much hassle.
Either way, it's not going to make any difference to GFX prices.
* OK,you can, but you'd have to be pretty nuts to
There is a good reason why Bitcoin doesn't use Smart Contracts. It's simply to not have code in the blockchain. So all you have on Bitcoin is data. Sure that data may break some really badly written software that works on it, but then you need to fix that software. Essentially you can do that by having a problem that checks the data to conform to the syntax you are looking for and ignores messages it cannot proof to be correct. After all, Parsing is a well established science.
However with Smart Contracts you have Turning complete code in your blockchain, which is, in principle, impossible to proof correct.
...until a mechanism was found to store binary data, this was to be the 'end of usenet' at a couple of points but it's still going strong. Admittedly the block chain doesn't have the capability to remove questionable content but I'm sure if usenet can survive storing questionable content the blockchain will find a way (although perhaps the answer is 'a different block chain').
Can someone fill me in?
So I believe this block chain contains every bitcoin transaction ever
Does every , um , wallet have a complete copy , or is the load shared out?
How big is it?
How fast is it growing?
Why does it need to have random code and pictures in it? is that the comment field on each transaction?
1) Yes, it contains a complete list of every transaction since it began in 2009
2) Every wallet must maintain an up-to-date copy
3) It passed 160GB just over a week ago
4) It has doubled in size in the last 19 months, however since blocks became full, its growth has been approximately linear since then (at ~1 MB/10 min). See here.
5) I suppose so!
It escapes my poor, limited understanding how a scheme that requires a large number of nodes (inherent in its "distributed web of trust") to store EVERY TRANSACTION EVER MADE could possibly be sustainable at a large enough scale to count as a "currency." Yes, "lightweight" nodes can store a subset, but that doesn't fix the fundamental insanity of the design.
Even the global banking system doesn't require every major bank to maintain the full transaction history of all major banks in order to function. For comparison, the Internet Archive only exists as one instance, not replicated X thousand times.
This sounds like a banking system designed by someone who didn't understand banking. There's no way it can possibly scale up far enough to be more than a curiosity/money-laundering tool/means to fleece the unwary.
Sounds like there's a need for tags on transactions, including Quarantine, illegal in France, illegal in China etc. The entries are still there but if you're using software that's aware of this you might be deemed to be legitimate. If you're using software that allows you to open such transactions the handcuffs are waiting for you.
That then pushes the question back to 'who adds the tags?'.
Full nodes need to have a complete copy. There are light wallets that don't, which work by talking to a remote full node.
Bitcoin includes a scripting language. By using a scripts to decide whether a payment is authorised it gains a great deal of flexibility, to support things like multi signature accounts, time-locked accounts etc. The scripting language can include arbitrary data because nobody bother to make the effort to exclude it. Even if they had, you can encode information into the amounts being transacted.
Full nodes need to have a complete copy. There are light wallets that don't, which work by talking to a remote full node.
Whoops.
The documentation for the Electrum wallet software mentions the use of a technique originally described by the creator called "Simple Payment Verification", which allows it to work by downloading only the headers (currently ~40MB by my reckoning.) I suppose this is much more important now than it once was, considering the size of the blockchain.
How convenient for the Authorities, oohhh think of the children or security. I'm no fan of bitcoin as I think it's a Ponzi scheme dreamt up by tulip sellers to relieve the gullible of their cash which also happens to be a nice medium of exchange for crims but this does smack of a convenient hatchet job.
At times, currencies were backed by tangible resources such as gold or silver
Then the notes were stand-ins for the shiny metals that made up the real currency.
Do you need gold? It's not really that important for most people's lives compared to the importance of money. The only thing that gives money value is taxation, because everybody pays taxes and so everybody needs at least a little bit of money.
This is just overblown. An example:
Say I create a tweeter account and start posting a series of emojis (smiles and frowns, representing 1 and 0). I have a program that takes an image file in binary format, and translates the image file into a serious of of tweeter posts and posts them automatically. Then I sell another program to some consumers that can re-assemble the image file from the tweets.
This is very straightforward to do, even for someone not so experienced with programming.
So can one then go and blame tweeter as a platform for child porn distribution?
Of course, I admit there is one difference from the blockchain in that Tweeter can delete these tweets, if it detects them, while the transactions on the blockchain are immutable (at least with the current state of the technology).
By the exact same rational applied to blockchain this applies to the transparency log for all .com .net etc SSL domains we browse too.
If somebody, not I, put illegal content in any domain registered in certificate transparency log,,, does this mean we have to destroy the entire .com cetificate transparency and take out quite literally the majority of business SSL trusted sites? There is no way to remove one entry without invalidating the entire tree -- just like a block chain.
That would be quite chilling
Certificate logs over view:
https://www.certificate-transparency.org/log-proofs-work
Governments don't have a vested interest in destroying SSL so I would expect it to get a free pass.
This constant drip drip drip of negative Bitcoin propoganda smacks of dark arts organisation and planning.
What's the schedule for next month guys?
1/4 Yahoo to ban crypto ads
2/4 IRS to announce a crack down
3/4 Japan to revoke legal tender status
4/4 Microsoft to ban crypto ads
5/4 Singapore to seize some miners
6/4 California power company to ban mining
7/4 Goldman Sachs to issue chilling bubble warning
8/4 FBI to seize an exchange for laundering drug money
9/4 Apple to ban crypto ads
Etc
I'm sure it's all planned out somewhere. If you can't shut it down legally, attempt to kill it with a thousand cuts..
Matthew Green cryptographer and professor at Johns Hopkins University has undertaken to have working code by end of this week to publish arbitrary data into the certificate log.
Once any illegal content is in the .com CT log the only means to remove it would be to also remove the ability for anybody to check they are connecting to a genuine .com site / the HTTPS certificate is real.
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