Bitcoin data tainted with child porn. (Comments, techies?)

[mainer]

I don't know enough about computers to be able to judge if this is true. But if it is, it means that everyone who owns bitcoin is vulnerable to blackmail, because -- child porn.

The Bitcoin world is coming to grips with a shocking revelation that could potentially threaten the very existence of the world's foremost cryptocurrency.

An analysis of the Bitcoin blockchain – the publicly accessible ledger of transactions upon which the system is built – has revealed this vast trove of data is irrevocably tainted with unremovable links to illegal child pornography, which are inevitably distributed among and by all users of the currency.

https://www.sciencealert.com/bitcoin-illegal-almost-everywhere-after-shocking-blockchain-discovery-child-pornography

[MineralMan]

1. Insofar as bitcoin is connected to the dark web, that's sort of true.

Child porn is widely circulated in that part of the online world, which isn't cataloged by normal search engines. Other illegal activities, like the drug trade, murder for hire and arms smuggling also are conducted in that realm. What all of those activities have in common is the need to somehow launder exchanges of money. Bitcoin is the coin of that realm, pretty much.

It has expanded to be part of normal, legitimate financial exchanges, but that's where it got its start. However, it's way too broad to just connect it to child pornography. That's just part of what goes on in those places that are unseen by most internet users.

But, it is part of the equation, and one of the uglier parts of that equation, certainly.

Bitcoin and other digital currencies will always involve some suspect activities, though. That's why so many avoid any connection to them.

[WhiteTara]

2. I'm confused how bitcoin itself could be "tainted"

Blockchain technology is one thing and bitcoin is another. You embed information in the blockchain but bitcoin is the currency, so to me it doesn't make sense. I'd love someone to technically explain this to me.

[MisterProton]

3. This is stupid...

I could do the same thing with paper checks... putting "0"s and "1"s in the note section over multiple checks, that when combined created an image. Would they throw out the entire banking system if someone injected an illegal pic into the system?

Also, if this becomes an issue, wait until decentralized storage really takes off - like Storj, Sia, Filecoin, or Maidsafe. They are fighting back the wind here.

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


"Asserting that there is child pornography on the blockchain would be like strolling through the U.S. Capitol Building, dropping a scrap of paper containing a deep web address, and then claiming that the American government is storing obscene content."

[hunter]

4. That was the brilliance of this pyramid-ponzi scheme.

Bitcoin's anonymous creators insulated themselves behind people who had some serious ugly to hide.

[Ezior]

5. The bitcoin transactions are all stored in the blockchain

I.e. whenever someone sends bitcoins to someone else, a new entry is added (inside a "block" ) to the end of the blockchain to commit the transaction. Bitcoin miners are responsible for creating new blocks containing transactions and appending them to the existing blockchain in a mathematically complex way (so they need lots of computing power).

Now the problem appears to be that miners can embed some custom data into the blocks they generate before they attempt to add them to the blockchain. This is an "old trick", as a BTC user called "LukeDashJr" already put crazy religious (Christian) messages into the blocks generated by his "St. Eligius" mining pool some 5-7 years ago.

But now someone put links to child porn in there. And someone else put a digital representation of a young woman's nude pic (not sure if child porn?) in there. In order to take part in the mining process, or send/receive bitcoins directly using the native bitcoin software client, you need to download the blockchain (at least that was true a few years ago when I used it). That doesn't mean you get to see the links to child porn, or the nude pic, but they are stored inside the database used by the bitcoin application. So if you analyze the files backing the database, you can probably extract that content.

There's no easy way to remove that content from the blockchain. The blockchain idea is centered around the concept that the past can't be altered (because that allows stealing BTC by introducing bogus transactions). It is theoretically possible to patch any software that interacts with the blockchain and put some hard-coded exceptions in there like "accept block X with invalid content Y because we had to remove the original content, it was illegal" – but that only works if people agree to use that modified software. (Otherwise there'd be 2 different blockchains, a BTC fork.)

Ugh. I still have 0.x BTC in my wallet from 2012 (~0 € back then). Strictly speaking, it may now be illegal for me to install and use the Bitcoin application to transfer them to some BTC exchange to trade them for Euros...