On Ordinals: Where do you stand?

[B1-66ER]

I have a question that is more about law enforcement than it is about technology. I apologise in advance if this question has already been asked and I overlooked it. As far as I understand, an image inserted into the blockchain using Ordinals will remain there in indefinitely. So, my question is the following.

what happens if someone else insert a child pornography photo into the blockchain? Is it going to make every network node illegal?

The general legislation guidelines state that it is a crime to “Acquire, possess, or store a photograph, video, or other form of recording containing an explicit or pornographic sex scene involving a child or adolescent by any means.”

PS- The law in US (I'm quite sure it's the same in the EU and any other civilised country.)

Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996.

Section 2256 of title 18, United States Code, is amended--
(1) in paragraph (5),
“data stored on computer disk or by electronic means which is capable
of conversion into a visual image”.

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[franky1]

firstly the mining pool owner would get arrested for distributing nasty stuff..

secondly. users have the defence that they were not personally motivated to seek and acquire such nasty material it was handed to them without their consent due to a system that just allows things to download onto their device without verifying content
(no motive or intent=accident)

.. because consensus has been softened to not do such security checks
(but yea. if police were to raid every node users house to charge them with storing it.. still get a good lawyer to make a good argument dont depend on justice to sort itself out and realise what was intentional vs accidental/unconsentual)

but yea mining pools need to be very very careful what they add to their blocks

but we should harden consensus to not allow such things through and reject blocks that try in the future becasue a malicious pool does do a stupid thing

[larry_vw_1955]

There's been several thousand sales and transfers of them already, so its far more than 1%. The motivation was he did it because he could -- there needn't be any further explanation. He is playing within the rules of the system, as is everybody who is doing inscriptions.

lets' see. 1000/100,000 equals 1%. so i guess i was about right. more or less. he's kind of abusing some feature that was never intended for that. if that's what you call playing within the rules of the system 

Not at all. The inscriptions that are already there cannot be removed, they will always be there (except locally through node pruning). If a change was made that prevented new ones from being made, it will only make the pre-existing ordinals that use them all the more valuable.

maybe but i still think most of them are worthless. i guess as time goes on though we'll see more interesting images. less stupid ones.

Like storing any type of data that one wants to render immutable in the world's most secure blockchain.

yeah i think what we have here is a base from which a decentralized web could be built. forget about ipfs. bitcoin will be taking that over thank you very much! along with increased transaction fees of course. 

[d5000]

I made a little visualization about the size of ordinal inscription transactions, to be able to follow the evolution of their impact in the chain:

https://dune.com/d5k/ordinals-by-size

For now I made two graphs, one about the evolution of size categories, the other about total/average size of inscriptions. I may make more.

I think it's too early to extract any trend, we're clearly still in the "novelty" phase where people are trying out, and while the peak in the absolute number of digital artifact inscription transactions was on February 9, on Feb. 12 a new peak of "total size" was reached (~260 MB were inscribed that day, which is almost half of the total block capacity of 550-570 MB/day in optimal conditions). I'll be observing it and then draw my final conclusions. For now I don't think it will disrupt Bitcoin too much, although it is a bit annoying, and it should really move to an emptier chain, be it NMC, LTC, GRS, Datacoin (yeah, that also exists!) or whatever.

About illegal material: I've read there were already illegal pics and links stored in the blockchain, since 2013 or so:

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2018/03/27/child-porn-on-bitcoin-why-this-doesnt-mean-what-you-might-think/

From the article:

Princeton professor Arvind Narayanan tweeted that the mainstream media's response to the report was "unsurprisingly superficial," adding, "First, the law is not an algorithm. Intent is an important factor in determining legality."
[...]
Plus, every U.S. state's handling of the disseminating of illicit material is different, but recalling Narayanan's sentiment, most laws hold people accountable only if they “knowingly possess” or produce, sell, broadcast or access the content “with intent to view.”

[nutildah]

This is all nonsense and 100% based on ill-informed conjecture. No mining pool owner has ever been arrested for what they "add to their blocks," despite there being some awful stuff in the blockchain since about 2013. Did not expect this CSW level of idiocy from you, reminding people of fictitious legal consequences if they don't do what you want them to.

What everyone forgets is you still need something to decode the data on the blockchain in order to view the images. The ordinals explorer has already taken to censoring objectionable material. Like everything else viewable on the internet, it is dependent on the moderation of the team hosting the website.

Saying it is up to miners is silly. That has never been the case. You have no precedent on which to base an argument that it will be now.

There's been several thousand sales and transfers of them already, so its far more than 1%.

lets' see. 1000/100,000 equals 1%. so i guess i was about right. more or less.

I said "several thousand" which is more than 1000. Out of the 116,142 inscriptions that have currently been made, 20,000 of them have been made as part of 2 collections that have been put up for sale. The first collection (10k 'Bitcoin Punks') has already sold out. Then there are thousands of over-the-counter sales for ones made by individuals & not part of any collection. You are almost as boring in your steadfast resolve to be wrong as franky.


edit:

I made a little visualization about the size of ordinal inscription transactions, to be able to follow the evolution of their impact in the chain:

https://dune.com/d5k/ordinals-by-size

For now I made two graphs, one about the evolution of size categories, the other about total/average size of inscriptions. I may make more.

This is really interesting, thanks for sharing.

About illegal material: I've read there were already illegal pics and links stored in the blockchain, since 2013 or so:

Exactly

[pooya87]

About illegal material: I've read there were already illegal pics and links stored in the blockchain, since 2013 or so:

I may be wrong but to my knowledge stuff on bitcoin blockchain (up to ordinals attack) have been an indirect links to the illicit content not the content itself. This is different from the blockchain actually containing the illicit stuff.

[larry_vw_1955]

What everyone forgets is you still need something to decode the data on the blockchain in order to view the images.

i think everyone understands that. but at some point they'll have a blockchain web browser that lets you browse through the images unfiltered.  and not need the little cybernanny what's his name? ordinals.com

I said "several thousand" which is more than 1000. Out of the 116,142 inscriptions that have currently been made, 20,000 of them have been made as part of 2 collections that have been put up for sale. The first collection (10k 'Bitcoin Punks') has already sold out. Then there are thousands of over-the-counter sales for ones made by individuals & not part of any collection. You are almost as boring in your steadfast resolve to be wrong as franky.

if what you say is true then i admit i was wrong. that make you feel better?  maybe it's time to get uploading to cash in on this new fad.

[nutildah]

i think everyone understands that. but at some point they'll have a blockchain web browser that lets you browse through the images unfiltered.  and not need the little cybernanny what's his name? ordinals.com

They're gonna have to host it anonymously on the dark web or risk the consequences, which is at the very least having their website taken down.

if what you say is true then i admit i was wrong. that make you feel better? 

Honestly I suppose so, but its because it means you learned something and I'm not just conversing with a brick wall.

https://beincrypto.com/cryptopunk-nft-copies-minted-as-bitcoin-ordinals-bored-apes-next/

maybe it's time to get uploading to cash in on this new fad.

I'm not really interested in that believe it or not, but at the end of the day most people are into bitcoin because of their desire to profit off it one way or another, and this new fad is just an extension of that.

[d5000]

I may be wrong but to my knowledge stuff on bitcoin blockchain (up to ordinals attack) have been an indirect links to the illicit content not the content itself.

Unfortunately you're wrong: the RWTH Aachen Study mentioned in the Coindesk article from 2018 I linked above discovered at least one illegal picture in the blockchain. Of course, the methods used then to store data (it's possible this was even before OP_RETURN was introduced, although for pictures OP_RETURN isn't of any use due to its size limit) were much more sophisticated, using fake addresses and the like in large transactions that looked like "financial" ones, so there was no "explorer" one could view to see the contents.

[...] a widely-publicized report from RWTH Aachen University found one graphic image of child porn and 274 links to content depicting child abuse stored within the bitcoin blockchain.

Source

[franky1]

nutildah..
we all know you have done these crappy memes yourself.
and you are now trying your damned hardest to promote them and make the popular and not want them to stop

we get it your one of caseys gang or casey himself

but no pool has a precedent of being arrested for putting porn on bitcoin because.. there was no illicit porn on bitcoin before. because its just been links and quotes. not actual illicit porn

however it is a crime to distribute illicit porn and mining pools do validate and verifies and makes a choice of what they collate into a block more so than what a user ends up getting
user nodes dont choose what they end up getting in a block.

there is a big difference between a user node and a mining node

EG
an anyonecanspend being relayed unconfirmed by nodes is treated differently than what is same byte for byte lump is treated as by a mining pool owner collating that lump
vs what user nodes treat same said lump once in a block

users didnt ask for said lump in a block
but a pool chose said lump to be in a block

meaning they purposefully chose said lump of data to be added which they have a responsibility to verify and a opportunity to verify what they chose to go into THEIR block template
meaning they had means and opportunity

there is no precedent because ordinal s is a young thing only recently been allowed and so far (luck) there has been no porn to set precedent

but lets not even pretend "no harm no foul" to even suggest someone should try
instead we should prevent before it happens

sorry your side hustle project you love is not admired and does have legal consequence which you want to deny and pretend doesnt exist. but there is legal risk.
so lets not chance it.

and by the way..
its you that want things more so then me.
its you that want things that are making bitcoin seem less appealing.
so its you and doomad types that sound more like CSW

but nice try
yep you want to make bitcoin be less of a currency network and more of a meme network
basically you want people to treat bitcoin like dogecoin. a laughing stock.

[Wind_FURY]

That's debatable at best in my opinion. Its main ethos, main value-proposition, is and always will be censorship-resistance.

Censorship-resistant, peer-to-peer electronic cash. It's as if you stopped your sentence half-way through.
It has never been about censorship-resistant cloud storage. Big distinction.

I can't debate against that, and I don't disagree, BUT the point is, is it right for the community to demand that miners censor those transactions containing data? It would be against permissionlessness and censorship-resistance.

Plus we already know that the miners won't listen because they're incentivized to mine those transactions and include them in blocks. Especially if users are overpaying to have their dick pics and fart sounds in the blockchain.

[pooya87]

I may be wrong but to my knowledge stuff on bitcoin blockchain (up to ordinals attack) have been an indirect links to the illicit content not the content itself.

Unfortunately you're wrong: the RWTH Aachen Study mentioned in the Coindesk article from 2018 I linked above discovered at least one illegal picture in the blockchain. Of course, the methods used then to store data (it's possible this was even before OP_RETURN was introduced, although for pictures OP_RETURN isn't of any use due to its size limit) were much more sophisticated, using fake addresses and the like in large transactions that looked like "financial" ones, so there was no "explorer" one could view to see the contents.

[...] a widely-publicized report from RWTH Aachen University found one graphic image of child porn and 274 links to content depicting child abuse stored within the bitcoin blockchain.

Source

Yeah, I skimmed through the PDF that was linked there and to be honest I wasn't convinced since there wasn't any proof provided (for understandable reasons of course) and the way they put it sounds like a very subjective matter.
I also specifically don't understand the bold part below. If they have extracted the file from the blockchain, how can it not be verified and why are they referring to an online forum in this case if the file is indeed on the blockchain and not a link to a content on another website.

The remaining instance is 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 (due to ethical concerns we refrain from providing a citation).

[NotATether]

basically you want people to treat bitcoin like dogecoin. a laughing stock.

Depends on who you ask. Charlie Munger still thinks we're all laughing stocks, ordinals or not: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/15/investing/charlie-munger-daily-journal-warren-buffett/index.html

But actually, let's look at this from another perspective.

Ordinals will spam the blockchain, yes. However, this could actually be the catalyst to accelerate development of alternate scaling protocols (that is, besides LN) that will make transactions faster for everyone, and stands a chance of being used by everybody (as ordinals eventually will be if its current adoption rates continues on a ChatGPT-like curve).

So it could be the push we all needed to get this scalability problem unstuck - and in a way that doesn't surrender control of transactions to 3rd parties. It will likely be a solution made by a small individual program that augments Bitcoin Core, just like the one Casey wrote for ord.

Because I honestly don't see any solution for this forthcoming from bitcoin-dev mailing list.

[franky1]

any dev team that is not core, that wants to change the rules gets REKT
yes there are brands that just follow the "reference clients" lead, but dare they want equal proposal publishing and choice.. REKT they go

they see alternative bitcoin nodes brands wanting to offer solutions/proposals as opposition/competition. not colleagues/community members

the whole moderation of core disliking independent scrutiny, critique, review.
the whole be a contributor and we will merge your grammar checks and put you as a credited contributor, but dare you implement code that goes against core roadmap you will get banned on their git-hub

is not the fault of the independent reviewers why core dev are oppositional. its that they like their close gate community but open window policy
you can look but you cant touch

more devs have moved over to altcoins such as ethereum. because core have bully moderators as door-men

this is why you see a lack of solutions mentioned on this forums dev discussion, the irc, the mailing list and the github

[n0nce]

About illegal material: I've read there were already illegal pics and links stored in the blockchain, since 2013 or so:

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2018/03/27/child-porn-on-bitcoin-why-this-doesnt-mean-what-you-might-think/

From the article:

Princeton professor Arvind Narayanan tweeted that the mainstream media's response to the report was "unsurprisingly superficial," adding, "First, the law is not an algorithm. Intent is an important factor in determining legality."
[...]
Plus, every U.S. state's handling of the disseminating of illicit material is different, but recalling Narayanan's sentiment, most laws hold people accountable only if they “knowingly possess” or produce, sell, broadcast or access the content “with intent to view.”

If that's the case, they should easily be able to back their statements by posting the block hashes. Knowing how media operates when it comes to Bitcoin and crypto, it would not surprise me if they stated it as fact, just because someone told them it is theoretically possible, or if it happened on another chain and they just attribute it to 'Bitcoin', because that pulls more views.
Generally, claiming anything being stored on the Bitcoin blockchain is one of the easiest things to prove; it is much harder to prove something like the correctness of a cryptographic algorithm or the existence of certain data on some company's server. As the ones putting out such accusation, they should also provide the proof.

Furthermore, if it was the case that someone already uploaded illegal material, we all know that it is not trivial to upload whole files into the blockchain. Technical users here may know how to do it, but there is no purpose-made application and mechanism specifically for uploading and forever storing any data to the blockchain, as well as for viewing it.

Only because something is possible, doesn't mean it should be done, and only because it has been done before, is not a justification to keep going and encouraging it. Civilization has done horrible things for centuries, and at certain points in time realized it was wrong and stopped doing it.

i think everyone understands that. but at some point they'll have a blockchain web browser that lets you browse through the images unfiltered.  and not need the little cybernanny what's his name? ordinals.com

They're gonna have to host it anonymously on the dark web or risk the consequences, which is at the very least having their website taken down.

Seriously? You want to rely on decoding not being trivial as a means to avoid accountability? I could say the same about plain files on your disk. You also need a specialized program to open and view those (your preferred photo viewing application). On disk, it's just plain bytes. Exactly like using a photo application locally, someone can easily self-host ordinals.com or write a similar software that locally parses the blockchain and displays 'ordinals' pictures saved on it. Larry is actually right here.

That's debatable at best in my opinion. Its main ethos, main value-proposition, is and always will be censorship-resistance.

Censorship-resistant, peer-to-peer electronic cash. It's as if you stopped your sentence half-way through.
It has never been about censorship-resistant cloud storage. Big distinction.

I can't debate against that, and I don't disagree, BUT the point is, is it right for the community to demand that miners censor those transactions containing data? It would be against permissionlessness and censorship-resistance.

I don't argue against censorship-resistant money. And I don't want censorship through miners. I honestly don't have a perfect solution right now, either, but I sure as hell won't encourage (ab)using Bitcoin as unfiltered cloud storage, forcing me to store anything that anyone pays a high enough amount for, on my own disks.
There are definitely cryptocurrencies where this is not possible, by heavily limiting the power of their scripting language, where (by design) something like multisig and payment channels are possible, but not arbitrary data storage. I am pretty sure that you can only do payments on Monero, for instance.

[B1-66ER]

GM,

franky1, d5000, and others, thank you for your comments and clarifications. I just discovered that bitcointalk has "Child Boards" for legal issues, so perhaps this discussion should be moved to that board.

If I understood correctly, the first checkpoint in the timechain for filtering unwanted data (or data that can cause more harm than good) would be the miners themselves.

About nasty/illegal on the timechain I do an analogy to the ToR network (btw they have a good FAQ about the topic on their official website.)

So, to answer the OP's original question. Although I recognise that the value of the timechain extends beyond financial data (recalling Satoshi's epic genesis block message about using public money to bail out private banks), I believe that timechain layer one has more value if we limit ourselves to financial data and leave non-financial data to some sort of up layer.

Thanks everyone.

[larry_vw_1955]

It's not going to be a decentralized version of YouTube, there would be no use for inefficiency by using the blockchain unless the information inscripted is something that requires censorship-resistance. Why put it in the blockchain? Just because?

we'll see.

But while we talk about that, debating about if/for/else, someone inscribed an audio file of a fart in the blockchain, https://ordinals.com/inscription/5e92195849607b400d77f01cb1146563ce523fed47f66a044e7a470016e05e59i0

There's a fart in the blockchain.

if there can be a fart in the blockchain then there can be short podcasts too. and maybe even short low resolution videos. those ones will be expensive though but people don't mind paying.

i even saw someone uploaded the front page of satoshi's white paper but why? why just the first page? what's the point?


 

They're gonna have to host it anonymously on the dark web or risk the consequences, which is at the very least having their website taken down.

Seriously? You want to rely on decoding not being trivial as a means to avoid accountability?

I don't think that's what he meant. he meant that a website that displays ordinals has responsibility to filter out "bad content". otherwise they could get in trouble for it. and get their domain name taken away. or their web hosting suspended.  so only people outside of the reach of those type of things could ever put "everything" online. same as it has always been except in this particular case you can bypass all of that by downloading the blockchain yourself and viewing it directly. No one can censor stuff that goes on to the blockchain. even though franky wants miners to put into that role. i don't think they would appreciate having to do that task.

[d5000]

Maybe you're right and it isn't illegal if it's a "young woman". I've also no intention to investigate that issue further.

My point was going more into another direction: We can't rely on the hope that nobody would ever insert illegal data in the blockchain. Because as I wrote there are ways to do this without Taproot or Ordinals. And someone who wants to destroy Bitcoin could use whatever method, even those old methods from 2013 requiring fake addresses and a lot of block space.

I'm also sure that one who really wanted to do it could even insert whatever data in a blockchain without any scripting, like Monero (that's also an answer to @n0nce). One simply would use a combination of addresses, transactions and amounts which would encode the picture, text or whatever, and then build a protocol around it. Would consume lots of block space as it's very inefficient, but it remains possible. If the protocol prevents you from see the data directly like they appear on-chain, you would have to use a vanitygen-style trial-and-error approach which would be more expensive, but always possible.

That's why I cited Arvind Narayanan. The crucial word is "intent". If you are using Bitcoin for financial things, not decoding illegal data/files, and (as a miner) reporting to the authorities if you have some info about someone who is trying to insert such data in the blockchain (i.e. IP adresses) then you should be safe.

(And no, I'm not endorsing Ordinals on BTC, but I stay with the stance that it's not as problematic as some see it.)

[larry_vw_1955]

That's why I cited Arvind Narayanan. The crucial word is "intent". If you are using Bitcoin for financial things, not decoding illegal data/files, and (as a miner) reporting to the authorities if you have some info about someone who is trying to insert such data in the blockchain (i.e. IP adresses) then you should be safe.

that's what you hope might be the case but that's something courts have to decide. not bitcoin users or community. it all depends how popular ordinals gets. the more popular it gets then the more attention it might attract from lawmakers. each jurisdiction might have it's own laws but one thing is for sure that no matter where someone lives, if the usa has a law against it then it will probably apply to them.  

or i guess in this naive alternate view of things, lawmakers will just turn the other cheek while acknowledging that bitcoin now stores porno but there's nothing that can be done about it so we might as well pretend it doesn't exist...

... if you have some info about someone who is trying to insert such data in the blockchain (i.e. IP adresses) then you should be safe.

imagine some fool uploading illegal porno to ordinals that doesn't use a fake ip. 

[nutildah]

No one can censor stuff that goes on to the blockchain. even though franky wants miners to put into that role. i don't think they would appreciate having to do that task.

Exactly. It is an unreasonable expectation that every miner should have to review the contents of all nonstandard/encoded transaction data waiting in the mempool before adding those transactions to a block.

Illicit material in encoded image form (not just links) has been added to the blockchain since 2013 -- they were just much smaller images; the debate has been ongoing since at least then:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1akyy4/what_happens_if_someone_inserts_illegal_content/

nutildah..
we all know you have done these crappy memes yourself.
and you are now trying your damned hardest to promote them and make the popular and not want them to stop

we get it your one of caseys gang or casey himself

lol & no to all of this. you are laughably unhinged.