Bitcoin Forum

https://www.rt.com/news/421863-child-abuse-blockchain-bitcoin/

Are these reports a real cause for concern?

 I rather doubt it. 

It is like saying some magazines have child porn so we have to ban all magazines. 

It may be true that there is some illegal activities, but look at the source;  Russia Today, which does have a slant on the news, and Russia is hoping to have its own crypto currency, so sabotage is not out of the possible.

It's pure fud, even though it is actually true. It shouldn't be a surprise that it is possible to store different kinds of data on the blockchain, so I don't see why they make a big deal out of it. It's just another attempt to bring Bitcoin down, but it won't be doing anything, where the less we talk about it, the less relevance it gets. People can upload disgusting images and video's on YouTube as well, where their algorithm needs some time to analyze the content and to remove it. Should we sue YouTube for that? Should they halt their entire operations and have their head quarters raided because of that? It's an attempt to scare off the average joe....

Here's a recent thread discussing the same: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3160352.msg32679323#msg32679323


Not to mention extremely old hat news. This caused the same flurry of concern almost five years ago when similar data was found in the blockchain. I've been reading more and more now recycled news. Seems the theory about media being in cycles about Bitcoin is true after all. We'll probably hear about it again in 2023, when people forget and move on.

Either journalists are getting lazy or some troll ran out of energy to find something new.

It's FUD, it might hurt the price a bit but it's nothing to worry about. No one blames the church when the priests are found to be fondling little boys and that's much more their fault than the blockchain technology is at fault for people misusing it. Actually eventually blockchain technology could be useful for tracking these guys because you could see exactly where certain things are moving around.

No, but for sure a lot of traders, especially the bears would use this to their advantage in order to get some form of momentum in trading. These type of news only reappears in a couple of years after the people's attention is shifted toward other things. Child porn existed even without the blockchain and is darn evident in the dark web. People are paying hundreds of dollars (take note, dollars) for these type of videos yet the media hasn't covered any type of reports for that one. Talk about unbiased reporting, lol. This would soon be forgotten until the media would find another recycled news to FUD again.

I think the first option is valid. It's basically the same with their Tether nonsense articles. Nothing new was there to add, but they still found it necessary to rehash old information, but then with slightly different wording.

These news sites are almost like how signature campaigns back in the days were allowing people to shit post in order to get paid. The more articles these site release, the more income they get.

In times where there isn't anything new or exciting, they'll have to be creative in order to still release content, and rehashing old articles is something they revert to quite often, especially in the last 12 or so months.

Its a genuine concern for miners and people who use a wallet which downloads the full blockchain instead of electrum etc. This is because there is that 1 actual pic on the blockchain (not the links). These people will now have a picture of child porn on their hard drive. Possession of a copy of a child porn is always illegal no matter what. It is one of the few laws where possession establishes the entire crime and not intent. For instance if a child you dont even know randomly sends you a nude pic you are automatically guilty.

That's totally a FUD.

No, There Isn’t Child Porn on the Bitcoin Blockchain (https://news.bitcoin.com/no-isnt-child-porn-bitcoin-blockchain/)

this is ultimately far more significant and far more subversive - https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z4k73w/someone-put-the-tiananmen-square-tank-man-image-in-the-bitcoin-blockchain-to-troll-china

now every chinese miner is harbouring forever a photo of the tiananmen square tank man and information about the protests. and every user can access it too. and no one can stop it.

but we're never gonna hear stories about this, are we?

Well, thanks for bringing that up, I almost believe it. I also read the same discussion content regarding this issue in my local social media news, and I was a bit worried that it might affect market price. But nah, this is totally a FUD, how could a system liable of all financial records and transactions store a different content?

Maybe they cannot think of any news to spread FUD again that's why they recycled some news. Since there are so many newbies in crypto world, this kind of news will still have an effect to the price and might scare some people. Child abuse as well as those other illegal activities have been existing since time immemorial obviously even before the existence of blockchain and now they are making a big deal out of it. Well this is another manipulation and we should just ride it by selling when the whales sell and buy when the whales buy. We cannot follow them the whole time but at least we have an idea when is the right time to buy or sell.

A waste of time reading the article. Its another FUD news trying to corrupt he mind of the people.
If this is supported with links, I might agree but since its not, basically a FUD news.
This news cannot affect the market for sure, better to invent a news that's quiet real. Lol

This is going to be an unpopular opinion but I really don't think it's complete FUD like the other posters suggest. It is old news being recycled for sure, but that doesn't mean there's no substance to it.

The difference between this material being on youtube vs the blockchain is that the blockchain is public and immutable.
Youtube can remove the content at will, magazines containing the content can be removed from publication and destroyed, whereas this material stays on the blockchain forever.  There is no method to remove that data once it's on there.

This means that if the govt decides at some time to bring down bitcoin they have a valid legal reason and technically everybody who has a copy of the blockchain on their hdd is in possession of highly illegal content and as such breaking the law.

Whether or not they decide to enforce it is another question but the analogies posted in this thread are faulty because none of those comparisons involve immutable media like the blockchain is.

To answer your original question I do believe it is a true cause for concern and if some particular SJW group decides to target bitcoin they have a very valid reason right there. It also doesn't help btc's reputation any considering the fact that it's been associated with the scum of the earth from the very beginning.

I believe this is a legitimate concern. Not just for child porn people. It's for anything.

Suddenly you have a tool anyone can use to upload any kind of sensitive material that no court in the whole world can take down.

You can't censor this either because that would be against bitcoin's decentralization policy. You can't have some kidn of central police that checks files uploaded to the blockchain.

So let's say some dude wants to have revenge on his ex, he can just upload nudes of her onto the bitcoin blockchain, and suddenly no one can take it down.

I think we should just hard fork or soft fork to disallow any kind of extraneous data on the blockchain, it should just be transactions.

no there is no picture, there is only hashes on the blockchain. in facts it is only 80 bytes max data which you then have to decipher and then follow it until you get to a picture.

this is just the media doing a widespread attack on bitcoin with certain pre-created content that they keep on releasing on fixed intervals to keep pushing the price down by creating panic in the market. and that is not even new. this news came out back in 2013 https://www.dailydot.com/business/bitcoin-child-porn-transaction-code/ or in other words when we had one of the bigger bubbles in bitcoin from $10 to $250 (2400%) and price was falling afterwards. now price had another bubble from $1000 to $20000 (1900%) and is now falling again and the same bullshit news is coming out.... hmmm...

on the same topic, this is interesting example from bitcoin.com (https://news.bitcoin.com/no-isnt-child-porn-bitcoin-blockchain/)

Yeha man... bitcoin at $10 was such a huge bubble, that thing was definitely not going past $11, was going to fall back to $0.3. That's totes what was going to happen. These experts

One reasonable thing is that some parts of those hashes when translated into human readable format results into "chunks" of data when arranged and put together became that "completed jigsaw puzzle" images and texts.

The whole blockchain is too huge that if you want to make something out of the hashes from the blocks is possible, it's even possible to find phrases/sentences out of it.
Like what they (FUD~ers) have been doing to books, highlighting words and making a mysterious "hidden" message to boost or destroy its fame.
Someone must have made up that news by finding those "hidden" evidence to spread that FUD.

It's a Retro FUD.

It's like saying "internet is the main transmission media for child pornography, therefore we should outlaw the internet/the internet is harmful for everyone".

I know anecdotally that the vast majority of bitcoin users do not even care about what is embedded in the bitcoin blockchain, let alone try to seek out anything illegal from the blockchain. And this isn't even new news, it's been discussed before. Plus, no pictures are actually stored on the blockchain. That would take up megabytes, which is just way too expensive.

So yeah, I'd say it's completely FUD to try to deter people from investing and buying BTC for... Absolutely no reason at all.

Will this affect price? I doubt it. It really do. The bitcoin community has moved past a point where it is immature enough to believe in such sort of FUD. But it does seem like someone is trying to manipulate the markets here.

it is pretty simple to know if it is actually FUD or not.
OP_Return (the method they use to add arbitrary data to blockchain) was added back in 2013 and the feature was enabled in bitcoin core client in 2014 in version 0.9.0
https://bitcoinfoundation.org/core-development-update-5/
https://bitcoin.org/en/release/v0.9.0#opreturn-and-data-in-the-block-chain
all of this happened 4-5 years ago and as a matter of fact all the drama about illegal content on the blockchain also happened in 2013-2014 and the media was filled with them.

now we are in 2018 and suddenly the media decided to take out an old news, dust it off and spread it around once again. what other motivation could they have other than spreading FUD?

That's sort of the problem with almost the entire content industry now, not just with crypto. Journalists are a dying breed. You've just got writers now monetising content. Clickbait works because... clickbait works. Now that I'm thinking back, the familiar themes surrounding Bitcoin have all been headlined before, and will all be headlined again.


Have you not heard of the internet? People could do all that long before Bitcoin's blockchain came online. I guarantee you people are not using the blockchain for the purpose of porn, when there's a much better medium to that sort of thing.

 
Fair enough, but I think you underestimate anyone's ability to remove anything from the internet... which actually started out with the same open access and censorship free ideals of Bitcoin. Any tool can be misused and abused. That does not make its foundational aspect flawed. It just defines humans.

BTC's reputation? I think censoring data on Bitcoin would do far more tremendous and irreparable harm to its reputation.

Throw back to 1980s and 1990s. The media were heavily critical on the internet, and it started out with the same evil reputations. It was a hangout for porn lovers, pervs, hackers, extortionists. Ring familiar bells? That is a cause for concern, but there is all the exact same thing in a public library. There's child porn on the Internet. My browser probably stores cookies from porn websites and terrorist links that I get from trawling www. I could go on.

That's not true, man. People used to do that, but then the government got smart about it and that's why they banned megaupload and other file2sharing sites. I think I heard that piratebay got closed down too.

Point is, there's always a crackdown after a matter of time.

And it's even moreso if it's your personal info, like if someone has inappropriate pics of you and they post it online, you can get a court-order and it WILL be taken down.

Sure, people can re-upload to a new site.. but the point is, that new site will eventually be taken down.

But no one can enforce anything on the bitcoin blockchain, and that's why it's scary.

government doesn't give a shit about these stuff. the real reason why sites like Megaupload were shut down is because of DMCA. in other words because of copyright laws. sites like Megaupload were a place for people to share copyrighted material such as Hollywood movies and when you mess with big companies like that which lose millions they shut you down.

This is generally some kind of nonsense! This is the same as banning kitchen knives because someone has slaughtered someone ... And if you compare what benefit the world can take with blockchain - then all these attempts to descredit blockchain are simply ridiculous ...

Now a days lot of fud news are spread in the crypto world. All is speculation and hear say so don't believe to that news because there's no strong evidence.

I'm not sure, it's like a fake news, facts are shown less clear and the source is also less supportive so do not believe the news

Exactly! Anyone who thinks the man is there because he's concerned with our welfare's been misled. All those shutdowns had huge corporate interests behind them. There's huge money, huge political interests, to lobby for that sort of move. The government doesn't get smart and crackdown on filesharing because they were threats to privacy - you think the government will crack down and close shop on Facebook? All the court orders in the world weren't motivated by human rights, but by good old money.

Bitcoin's blockchain shouldn't scare us because "no one can enforce anything it" (also not true actually, rules are enforced).

at least If there is any negative action, we will find out about it in any case. we must get used to that it is becoming more popular with the global financial structure and the state authorities are trying to gain control over the crypto currency.

If you have been keeping up to date, this sort of news are not a call for concern. Its just part of the usually FUD to cause fear in people in order to bad paint bitcoin. I don't know why people won't just stop. Using a child's porn to cause fear in people is just too much. I don't know if this have got anything thing to do with the government but whichever group of people doing this should just stop.

even if it's true or not we shouldn't make a big deal out of it since blockchain is not the first one to have a child pornography content, there's a lot of illegal activities outside of the blockchain and besides anonymous people are uploading those content on blockchain. In recognition of market price to this safe to say it will not affect overall market.

That situation can nothing do against bitcoins since there so many people keep looking for the bright side of it rather than to focus on its bad used and volatility. But those kinds of news/article shouldn't need to take serious with since there are so many useful articles that we need to read since those one can boost our confidence to the blockchain and crypto's.

many of this type of reports has been published year in years out and we now know that all is to create FUD and the major reason is to makes the whales rich. We should not have problems with this type of articles and you should not sell your holding because of the as there been paid to do these.