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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Replying to @el33th4xor
This is either ignorance or willful misrepresentation. The key difference is that on a blockchain they can't be removed, ever, without invalidating everything that follows in the chain.
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Replying to @RichFelker
Emin Gün Sirer Retweeted Emin Gün Sirer
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.
Emin Gün Sirer added,
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Replying to @el33th4xor
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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Replying to @RichFelker
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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Replying to @el33th4xor
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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Replying to @RichFelker @el33th4xor
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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Replying to @RichFelker
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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Assuming there is some meaningful information the blockchain is recording (like transactions, or notarizations, ...) it needs to be possible to read that information out. At worst the evil content can be stored as the transaction amounts themselves.
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