What would happen if someone encoded something horrible and illegal like child porn into a blockchain? Is everyone who operates on that chain guilty of possession? Does that make a specific crypto "illegal" if its blockchain contains illegal content?
(Unless you’re saying that the bits 0 and 1 already exist in the blockchain, which is reaaaaallllyyy stretching the definition.)
There’s the concept of “illegal numbers”, which means that there are technically numeric representations of images or copyrighted material that you can’t know/possess without breaking a law. But the law is subjective which is why we have judges and juries to apply judgement to whether having a large number written on a piece of paper is equivalent to possessing illegal material.
Which is a fancy way of saying that they haven't. The only images in the bitcoin blockchain are ascii art.
There are plenty of hashes of different types of data in the bitcoin blockchain, but hashes are not the hash function's input data.
Schneier himself repeated this bogus "there's illegal content in the bitcoin blockchain already!" claim, which shows the legs this false meme has on it.
Please stop repeating this falsehood.
JPG of Nelson Mandela encoded into bitcoin blockchain: http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photo...
Illegal porn and classified documents embedded in the blockchain (page 3): https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/pdf-33/accenture-editing...
Original research source: https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf
By that definition, however, every file could be transformed into an illegal one through a suitable cipher and key.
Then there's the concept of steganography.
Digital data is interesting for sure.
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There’s the concept of “illegal numbers”, which means that there are technically numeric representations of images or copyrighted material that you can’t know/possess without breaking a law. But the law is subjective which is why we have judges and juries to apply judgement to whether having a large number written on a piece of paper is equivalent to possessions illegal material.