Could Ordinals make having a copy of the Bitcoin blockchain justifiably illegal?

[NightFlare]

I'm new to Bitcoin, so I might not understand this situation well enough, in which case I would really appreciate some reassurance that Bitcoin is okay, because I am worried.

From what I understand, the so-called Bitcoin Ordinals are bits of data such as text or images that are inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain itself, either whole or in parts for larger files, rather than a link to an asset like an NFT.

But what happens when a malicious actor inscribes illegal exploitative images, which then become part of the blockchain? If this happens, it would then become illegal to own a copy of the blockchain itself because of the images included in it. This would be a justifiable reason to make having a copy of the blockchain illegal in a way that most people would accept. Am I missing something? Is there a way to mine and use the blockchain without this inscribed data?

I can imagine malicious government actors doing this as a way to have an excuse for governments around the world to seize any computer with a copy of the blockchain and imprison the person who copied the blockchain because they knowingly possessed illegal exploitative images. It's one thing that Bitcoin can be used to buy such images, but it's quite another to have to possess such images in order to use Bitcoin. The way I see it, that could justifiably destroy the reputation of Bitcoin and make it very difficult for people to use and destroy its ability to become a viable currency standard for the world. It wouldn't be so much of a problem if it were just a link or a hash of an image or something to prove ownership, but when you have to actually have to download illegal files to use Bitcoin, it becomes a serious issue.

Please tell me I'm missing something with how this works and that it cannot be exploited this way. If not, what can be done about it? This whole Ordinal business has me very concerned that this will ruin the future of Bitcoin. I'm hearing a lot about high tx fees, traffic jams, a bloated chain and such, but I think all that misses the real threat to Bitcoin.

[1714221492]

1714221492

[hatshepsut93]

I can imagine malicious government actors doing this as a way to have an excuse for governments around the world to seize any computer with a copy of the blockchain and imprison the person who copied the blockchain because they knowingly possessed illegal exploitative images.

Governments don't need to conjure any excuses to ban Bitcoin, because most of the population will be indifferent. A few hundreds of bitcoiners will gather to protest for a few days and then will go home. The fact that governments didn't  ban Bitcoin so far means they don't view it as a big problem. Maybe they don't even view it as a problem at all, because not much people are using it in a way that would threaten the government - they just trade in on centralized exchanges and that can be and does get taxed. So adding any malicious information to the blockchain won't change much in the current state of things.

[NightFlare]

I'm not talking about banning Bitcoin though. That's a different thing. Most governments can't ban Bitcoin because it would look too outright authoritarian if they did.

What I'm talking about is governments arresting people for possessing illegal content because they copied the Bitcoin blockchain if it contains illegal content. They haven't had that kind of excuse to get rid of Bitcoin before. They might not see Bitcoin as a problem now, but if it gives people an escape hatch out of the sinking dollar then they will care when they can't control people through money, and I'm worried the ordinal inscriptions will give them a justifiable excuse to get rid of Bitcoin. I'm sure that people could create a better crypto currency to fill that void, but I want Bitcoin to survive.

[be.open]

I'm not talking about banning Bitcoin though. That's a different thing. Most governments can't ban Bitcoin because it would look too outright authoritarian if they did.

What I'm talking about is governments arresting people for possessing illegal content because they copied the Bitcoin blockchain if it contains illegal content. They haven't had that kind of excuse to get rid of Bitcoin before. They might not see Bitcoin as a problem now, but if it gives people an escape hatch out of the sinking dollar then they will care when they can't control people through money, and I'm worried the ordinal inscriptions will give them a justifiable excuse to get rid of Bitcoin. I'm sure that people could create a better crypto currency to fill that void, but I want Bitcoin to survive.

There are different jurisdictions with varying degrees of loyalty to cryptocurrencies, and the degree of loyalty may change over time depending on the efforts of regulators. Innovative areas of progress such as crypto are always associated with increased risks, including legal ones. And since different people have different levels of risk tolerance, it's hard to give a universally good answer to your question. If you are prone to increased anxiety and have a tendency to cultivate phantom phobias, you might be better off looking for a more conservative type of activity.

[NightFlare]

There are different jurisdictions with varying degrees of loyalty to cryptocurrencies, and the degree of loyalty may change over time depending on the efforts of regulators. Innovative areas of progress such as crypto are always associated with increased risks, including legal ones.

I think you're missing the point here somewhat. There are different jurisdictions with varying degrees of loyalty to cryptocurrencies, but there is much less of a difference in jurisdictions when exploitative content is concerned, especially regarding children. For, example, let's say the U.S. dollar collapses. The U.S. may not like crypto currencies at that point and try to restrict them. However, El Salvador seems pretty good with crypto currencies and would benefit a lot by being friendly to crypto, especially if the U.S. isn't. However, I don't think even El Salvador would be okay with people there having and sharing child porn, so another crypto currency would be fine there, but Bitcoin would no longer be welcome.

So if it's just a case of a government, or even several governments being against crypto, the miners can always move to another jurisdiction that is friendly to crypto, but if it's a case where the Bitcoin blockchain contains content that is illegal in every jurisdiction, then there is no place to go. I'm not talking about cryptos in general. There's always some risk from governments to any crypto currency, and I'm fine with that because there are other jurisdictions. If Bitcoin is rendered unusable because no one can legally store its blockchain anywhere in the world, then another crypto currency will come along to replace it, but I want Bitcoin to survive.

[cryptosize]

Has anyone uploaded pedo pr0n Ordinals in the blockchain?

The worst I've seen is goatse (and was quickly censored on Ordinals.com)...

[NightFlare]

Has anyone uploaded pedo pr0n Ordinals in the blockchain?

I don't think anyone has yet, but what happens when they do? goatse was censored on Ordinals.com, but from what I understand it is now a permanent part of the Blockchain forever and accessible to anyone who has a copy of the blockchain and a viewer that doesn't sensor it. So the question no one is answering is what happens when actually illegal things are put into the Blockchain, rather than just gross things, making the blockchain itself illegal to have a copy of?

I'm hoping there's a way to either stop Ordinals before that happens or remove Ordinals from the blockchain after the fact without a hard fork or a totally new blockchain that isn't vulnerable in the same way.

[cryptosize]

Has anyone uploaded pedo pr0n Ordinals in the blockchain?

I don't think anyone has yet, but what happens when they do? goatse was censored on Ordinals.com, but from what I understand it is now a permanent part of the Blockchain forever and accessible to anyone who has a copy of the blockchain and a viewer that doesn't sensor it. So the question no one is answering is what happens when actually illegal things are put into the Blockchain, rather than just gross things, making the blockchain itself illegal to have a copy of?

I'm hoping there's a way to either stop Ordinals before that happens or remove Ordinals from the blockchain after the fact without a hard fork or a totally new blockchain that isn't vulnerable in the same way.

Bitcoin has many enemies (including Feds).

Any idea why they don't upload pedo pr0n to make the blockchain illegal?

[NightFlare]

Has anyone uploaded pedo pr0n Ordinals in the blockchain?

I don't think anyone has yet, but what happens when they do? goatse was censored on Ordinals.com, but from what I understand it is now a permanent part of the Blockchain forever and accessible to anyone who has a copy of the blockchain and a viewer that doesn't sensor it. So the question no one is answering is what happens when actually illegal things are put into the Blockchain, rather than just gross things, making the blockchain itself illegal to have a copy of?

I'm hoping there's a way to either stop Ordinals before that happens or remove Ordinals from the blockchain after the fact without a hard fork or a totally new blockchain that isn't vulnerable in the same way.

Bitcoin has many enemies (including Feds).

Any idea why they don't upload pedo pr0n to make the blockchain illegal?

Ordinals are pretty new, so they probably haven't thought of it yet, but it's only a matter of time if it's a vulnerability.

[Ben Barubal]

     First of all right now bitcoin is not okay because of those ordinals. And I know many bitcoin experts will agree with what I am saying.
The effect of this is obvious in the fees which are very high which is not really good.

     Was that done to encourage the community here to have NFT loveliness. The majority of bitcoin holders don't really care about NFT. If this increase in bitcoin fees continues, how can we persuade others to enjoy Bitcoin if the transaction fees to be deducted are too expensive.

     It seems like what is happening now, BRC20 or the ordinals are just destroying what Bitcoin has worked so hard for in this industry just because of that. It's likely that if this doesn't change, for sure the merchants who accepted Bitcoin as one of their payment options have stopped because of the high fees, and it's likely that within a short period of time it will not be unclear that it will suddenly decrease bitcoin holders are large.

[NotATether]

Any idea why they don't upload pedo pr0n to make the blockchain illegal?

You only have 1MB to fit it in, and that's if you basically want to pay like 5BTC in fees. So more realistically, you have only a few kilobytes to work with, which is hardly enough for even low-quality GIFs.

[NightFlare]

Any idea why they don't upload pedo pr0n to make the blockchain illegal?

You only have 1MB to fit it in, and that's if you basically want to pay like 5BTC in fees. So more realistically, you have only a few kilobytes to work with, which is hardly enough for even low-quality GIFs.

On Gamma.io I uploaded a 300kb, 1920 × 1200 photo that was fairly good quality and the fee to create the inscription was $113, and it was still smaller than the maximum size. So, if someone wanted to inscribe a sat with an illegal image of decent quality that they could definitely do it.

[thecodebear]

Any idea why they don't upload pedo pr0n to make the blockchain illegal?

You only have 1MB to fit it in, and that's if you basically want to pay like 5BTC in fees. So more realistically, you have only a few kilobytes to work with, which is hardly enough for even low-quality GIFs.

On Gamma.io I uploaded a 300kb, 1920 × 1200 photo that was fairly good quality and the fee to create the inscription was $113, and it was still smaller than the maximum size. So, if someone wanted to inscribe a sat with an illegal image of decent quality that they could definitely do it.

Side question: why in the world would you pay $113 to upload a photo?? lol

Is that really the sort of fee people are paying to do NFT jpegs on Bitcoin? That's just sad. Why even bother?

[cryptosize]

Any idea why they don't upload pedo pr0n to make the blockchain illegal?

You only have 1MB to fit it in, and that's if you basically want to pay like 5BTC in fees. So more realistically, you have only a few kilobytes to work with, which is hardly enough for even low-quality GIFs.

It doesn't have to be a video, just a photo would suffice.

Any idea why they don't upload pedo pr0n to make the blockchain illegal?

You only have 1MB to fit it in, and that's if you basically want to pay like 5BTC in fees. So more realistically, you have only a few kilobytes to work with, which is hardly enough for even low-quality GIFs.

On Gamma.io I uploaded a 300kb, 1920 × 1200 photo that was fairly good quality and the fee to create the inscription was $113, and it was still smaller than the maximum size. So, if someone wanted to inscribe a sat with an illegal image of decent quality that they could definitely do it.

Side question: why in the world would you pay $113 to upload a photo?? lol

Is that really the sort of fee people are paying to do NFT jpegs on Bitcoin? That's just sad. Why even bother?

Some people have money to burn. As simple as that.

[hd49728]

If things get worse, the community might split to pieces and we might see another fork from Bitcoin. Who want to have a blockchain which does not allow NFTs will stay with that chain. Who want to support NFTs on Bitcoin blockchain like Ordinals and more new use cases in future will support another chain.

Hopefully we won't have such forks and developers, community will have solutions for it and reach to a consensus to move on.

Honestly I don't think if the protocol remains like now, things will be better in 2024 and 2025 bull run. Bull run usually increases demand to use the blockchain and in 2023, we are only in a bear market but mempool already is overloaded with Ordinals and BRC20 token transactions.

[DannyHamilton]

From what I understand, the so-called Bitcoin Ordinals are bits of data such as text or images that are inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain itself, either whole or in parts for larger files,

It has always been possible to create transactions with data such as text or images. There's nothing new about that.  This is just yet another way of accomplishing the same thing.

But what happens when a malicious actor inscribes illegal exploitative images, which then become part of the blockchain? If this happens

It already happened, over a decade ago. Hasn't been a problem yet.  You can just run a SPV wallet or other form of light wallet if you don't want to download the blockchain. Or, you can run a pruned node if you want a full verification node but don't want to store the full blockchain contents.

[NightFlare]

It already happened, over a decade ago. Hasn't been a problem yet.  You can just run a SPV wallet or other form of light wallet if you don't want to download the blockchain. Or, you can run a pruned node if you want a full verification node but don't want to store the full blockchain contents.

Thank you. Being new to Bitcoin, I had no idea this had already happened and been dealt with. This allowed me to answer get the answer to what I wanted to know but didn't know how to formulate the question. My fundamental question was can the illegal material be removed so that blockchain isn't corrupted without having to do a hard fork or something like that, and the answer is yes.

There's an article I found that addresses this issue pretty well: https://www.wired.com/story/why-porn-on-the-blockchain-wont-doom-bitcoin/

[joniboini]

My fundamental question was can the illegal material be removed so that blockchain isn't corrupted without having to do a hard fork or something like that, and the answer is yes. There's an article I found that addresses this issue pretty well: https://www.wired.com/story/why-porn-on-the-blockchain-wont-doom-bitcoin/

I'm not sure the article you linked suggests that we can remove material from the blockchain. As far as I understand it, the author basically says that the law would not be that rigid when it comes to blockchain. People running a node share similarities with those who run a ToR exit node or something else, and nobody is going to jail just because of that. I think he brings up a good point regardless. I do believe intent does matter and the government is not stupid enough to jail people just because they run a node.

[NightFlare]

I'm not sure the article you linked suggests that we can remove material from the blockchain.

The part of the article I was talking about is this:

If and when attempts to poison blockchains become more common, can blockchain software be redesigned to allow users to delete data that’s known to be objectionable? For straightforward ways to encode data into blockchains, the answer is yes. Because bitcoin’s blockchain allows its users to include arbitrary data in a transaction that’s irrelevant to the bitcoin software, much like a comment column in a ledger, one potential fix would be to make that feature editable or deletable. At least so far, most non-financial data has been encoded into the blockchain using this comment-like space.

I don't know if that means that the content can be removed now, but I'm not so worried about that, so long as it could be removed with a change that doesn't require a hard fork. However, I did find this on ordinal inscriptions indicating that at least with ordinal inscriptions they can currently be removed:

https://thebitcoinmanual.com/articles/pros-cons-ordinals/

Your inscription can be pruned.
Bitcoin nodes are not be required to keep the signature data, which means an individual node could prune that data from its storage and should the nodes achieve consensus on pruning certain witness data, proof your inscription is gone. This is highly unlikely, there is usually some node that wouldn’t be too bothered to house a full copy of the data, but if it does become a real issue nodes could approach ordinals in two ways, other than ignoring and removing the data.

Some nodes could choose to specialize in storing all inscription data. This gives those nodes special weight (as a trusted source) to verify and authenticate ordinal transactions.
Companies and individuals operating a node can keep their own copies of transaction records so they have access to the signature data later.
But this is antithetical to the idea of bitcoin as a decentralized, trustless system, with no central authority; as you now create a federation or custodian for ordinals and inscriptions.

Personally, if this means that if all of the ordinal inscriptions get deleted I wouldn't mind at all because I think they are generally a bad idea and I think Bitcoin should only be used for currency and transactions. But, since it looks like they can't fundamentally poison the blockchain they seem to be annoying, but not harmful long-term.

As far as I understand it, the author basically says that the law would not be that rigid when it comes to blockchain. People running a node share similarities with those who run a ToR exit node or something else, and nobody is going to jail just because of that.

I don't agree with this point. There is a fundamental difference between the blockchain and tor exit nodes, which is that with exit nodes the data is all encrypted and the person running the node has no way of knowing what traffic is going through the node. It's very different from a person downloading a file that contains illegal images that are unencrypted, they know are part of the file, and are relatively easy to view. There would be an excuse for new transactions that are authenticated that contain illegal material, but once they are identified, I think anyone holding on to the data must delete it or suffer legal consequences.

I think he brings up a good point regardless. I do believe intent does matter and the government is not stupid enough to jail people just because they run a node.

I agree that intent matters, but I don't trust any government to be fair if they have a strong incentive to weaponize the legal system that that government itself runs. I do believe that many governments are stupid enough to jail people just for running a node. And with some material, I think the general population would probably agree that they should be jailed. So I could very much imagine a situation where anyone who runs an unpruned node could reasonably be thrown in jail. For example, let's say people anonymously pay a pornographer to put illegal images on the blockchain. If there were no legal consequences to running a node with the illegal content on it, the customers could then run a full node and would have all that material available for them to view anytime they wanted to without any legal risk. The important part is that intent couldn't be determined in that case. The police wouldn't really be able to tell if their intent was running a full node as part of the Bitcoin network or to legally possess an illegal porn stash, so I think that eventually it could very well not be possible to have an unpruned copy of the Blockchain without serious legal risk.

The way I see it, it doesn't look good for the future of ordinal inscriptions because of that possibility, but I'm satisfied that that scenario doesn't threaten the future of Bitcoin as a currency, which is what I care about.

[Dunamisx]

From what I understand, the so-called Bitcoin Ordinals are bits of data such as text or images that are inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain itself, either whole or in parts for larger files, rather than a link to an asset like an NFT.

They are artifacts introduced to the bitcoin blockspace which is receiving a serious hype on its users making our own bitcoin transaction fee higher as it advances in occupying each bitcoin blockspace causing extra activities to be taken place on the bitcoin network such as network congestion and high transaction fee.

But what happens when a malicious actor inscribes illegal exploitative images, which then become part of the blockchain?

The nodes get attacked and the bitcoin network cease to comply to the proper protocols it's meant to follow and malicious attack set in, which can cause serious manipulations on the system, loss of coins and many other threat in loosing trust on the blockchain which we never pray to happen.