Child Abuse Imagery Found Within Bitcoin's Blockchain (theguardian.com)

German researchers have discovered unknown persons are using bitcoin's blockchain to store and link to child abuse imagery, potentially putting the cryptocurrency in jeopardy. From a report: The blockchain is the open-source, distributed ledger that records every bitcoin transaction, but can also store small bits of non-financial data. This data is typically notes about the trade of bitcoin, recording what it was for or other metadata. But it can also be used to store links and files. Researchers from the RWTH Aachen University, Germany found that around 1,600 files were currently stored in bitcoin's blockchain. Of the files least eight were of sexual content, including one thought to be an image of child abuse and two that contain 274 links to child abuse content, 142 of which link to dark web services. "Our analysis shows that certain content, eg, illegal pornography, can render the mere possession of a blockchain illegal," the researchers wrote. "Although court rulings do not yet exist, legislative texts from countries such as Germany, the UK, or the USA suggest that illegal content such as [child abuse imagery] can make the blockchain illegal to possess for all users. This especially endangers the multi-billion dollar markets powering cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin."

Comments

Wow

[AlanObject]

So -- someone is going to declare that hundreds of millions of people world wide woke up this morning and are suddenly prosecute-able criminals and have been ever since that content was added to the blockchain? That should interesting to see how they work that out.

Think of the children!

[Qbertino]

Ban Cryptocurrency! ...

I guess some academic nobody needed attention.
Well, he did get his 5 minutes.

Wikileaks?

[VeryFluffyBunny]

It seems to me like Bitcoin would be a great place to publish leaked documents and perform whistle-blowing activities. That could be one actually useful purpose for blockchain :)

Surprised they wouldn't have considered this

[RobinH]

For a moment a few years ago I was interested in some kind of crypto messaging system loosely based on the concept of BitTorrent (I forget the name, like BitMessage or something) but your PC, acting as a node, basically got a copy of every message, encrypted, and your client could only decrypt the messages that were encrypted with your public key, so you could only read your mail. So far so good... if your PC had a copy of a message with illegal material in it, you'd have plausible deniability - there's no way you could read it without the recipient's key so no (sane) court would convict you for possession.

The problem is the system also supported broadcast messages. So I could write a message encrypted with my private key, and everyone who had my public key could decrypt it. It offers a way of authenticating that a certain person sent a message. The problem is, now I've potentially got illegal content on my PC and since the key to decrypt it is public, I can no longer claim I can't read it. Any forensic group could grab my PC and "prove" that it had illegal content on it very easily. In fact, it allows someone to plant easily provable illegal content on everyone's PC. Bad idea.

I brought up this issue, but nobody on the forums took it seriously. I gave up on the whole idea after that. Seems to me the idea of allowing random text into the blockchain is an obviously bad idea. I didn't even realize that was possible.

Re:Best. Prank. Ever.

[Bradmont]

Of course there are perverts out there that would do this sort of thing, but one of my first thoughts was : Maybe it was someone in the banking industry trying to discredit a competitor. And I'm not even a bitcoin fanboy!

Re:Isn't this traceable?

[chispito]

Shouldn't it be fairly simple to determine when this was added to the blockchain? My assumption was this was injected early on, when single systems still had a decent chance to write a block. If we know when it was injected, we should know the wallet to which coins were issued to, then there's a decent probability this could be traced back to the individual running the system, who may (or may not) be responsible.

It doesn't matter if you find who did it, the--likely intentional--damage is done. This is was likely done to manipulate the value of bitcoin by demonstrating a very real problem with the technology. If you really want to find out who injected some of this content, look into why the university performed this research. Maybe somebody tipped them off.