Thread on images on the blockchain: As long as there is user-provided data, systems that store that data can be commandeered to store what is being called "illegal content." True for Google Docs, true for blockchains.
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Not quite: https://twitter.com/el33th4xor/status/976544202367684609?s=19 … If you download from the most recent block backwards, you can skip downloading any data whose hash and side effects you know.
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This is an implementation detail and may be true about some blockchains, but not all, and seems to be trivial to bypass by storing the evil data in the side effects or any metadata that necessarily has to be kept.
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If your point is "it will always be possible to encode steg messages on any storage medium," we agree, see the first message in thread. If you are worried that blockchains will be commandeered to transmit vile images on a scale to cause societal problems, we disagree.
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It's neither. It's that an append-only ledger writable by anyone carries inherent risk that any user/participant will necessarily be forced to possess things whose possession carries penalty of imprisonment.
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This has absolutely no relation to hiding evil data in non-blockchain storage; in that case you can just delete (or never get it to begin with) and all your other data is intact because it has no dependency on the deleted data to use or validate the rest.
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Ok, your argument comes down to "it will always be possible for a user to determine the side effects/meta-data, and ergo, they can always encode something on a chain whose removal is problematic." This is true for Bitcoin, but there's no impossibility result backing it.
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There's also the legal issue of whether the Section 230 exemption should apply to nodes in a peer to peer system. There are many arguments and counterarguments, so I won't touch that one right now, but it's not a settled question that storing bits without a decoder is possession.
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And lastly, channel capacity matters a lot in steganography. A channel that requires millions of transactions to encode an image, costing tens of thousands of dollars, is interesting to ponder intellectually, but not a realistic threat on our way of life.
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