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September 29, 2012, 11:50:39 AM |
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Thanks for clearing that up.
I'd like to hear opinions on what the course of action should be in the following hypothetical scenario. An attacker embeds some illegal content, let's say child porn, in the blockchain. This can be done quite cheaply. He then writes and distributes an application that takes a tx hash as input from the user, and then uses the bitcoin protocol to obtain that tx/block containing that tx from some peer decode the content and display it to the user. The application itself is clearly not illegal any more than a browser is illegal, it is simply a viewer that can be used to view both the good and the bad.
On the other hand anyone serving this content may find themselves in trouble with the law. Now, it is unlikely that anyone will go to jail, since you could quite honestly claim that you were unaware of the illegal content, in the same way that Zuckerberg wouldn't go to jail if someone uploaded illegal content to facebook. The critical difference though is that the bitcoin node operator has no way of removing the illegal content when served with a takedown notice (other than taking down the entire node). The software could easily be modified to not respond to requests for certain blacklisted txs/blocks, but if everyone did this, then new nodes would be unable to start up. Even if only a large fraction of nodes did this, many new nodes will find no willing host among it's peers and the blockchain download will never complete.
This sort of attack is cheap to execute and, combined with a large short position on BTC, may even be profitable. It won't kill bitcoin, since there will always be someone running a node as a hidden service, but it may deliver a crippling blow that may be very difficult to recover from, especially if powers that be manages to form an association between bitcoin and child porn in the public mind.
Ideas?
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