This is “uncensorable” in the same way that “sovereign citizens” are immune from prosecution. Once someone uses it for something which is actually illegal, they’ll learn how useful blockchains are for prosecutors.
The underlying mistake is thinking about this like a game where you can make up rules for the government to follow. What actually happens is one of two paths:
1. You’re outside their jurisdiction, so anything will work because your local police don’t care. Maybe you have to avoid traveling to certain places or doing business with certain companies but you can almost certainly live a full life with minimal impact unless you’re doing something like leaking the secrets of a drug cartel or Russian oligarch.
2. You’re subject to their authority, which gives them a rich suite of tools ranging from arresting you, having ISPs filter DNS or network connections, launching denial of service attacks on your infrastructure, etc. How much effort they’ll expend depends on exactly what you’re doing and how authoritarian the government is, not the technology.
The readme does explain that you could censor it by blocking access the chain entirely, it's not pretending otherwise.
But by embedding the information into the chain, if you are just reading posts I don't know how snoops could notice. You just need to run a node that keeps up with the state of the chain; there's no obvious way for network snoops to know whether you're doing that because you are using Handshake to resolve domain names or to read messages embedded in it, since you can do all that offline.
Okay, so now you’ve downloaded the entire chain. Does that seem safe to have in your possession in this scenario? Even if I have the storage, I would not want to find out that someone else had uploaded something illegal when the police search my computer/phone and I have to prove to their satisfaction that I didn’t know.
If you don’t download the entire chain, your traffic connecting to certain nodes and downloading certain sizes can be enough to track you - there are academic papers about using this to figure out what movies you’re watching over HTTPS – and that’s assuming that you don’t learn the hard way that the fast server with all of the underground content is the secret police’s honeypot.
This is all probably moot in any case because it’s tricky to build something like this which never does DNS resolution, connects to a suspicious server, etc. The average user is going to have a very hard time avoiding mistakes like that, and that’s assuming you don’t have police informants encouraging unsafe opsec or use of treacherous apps — real things which happen to dissidents and activists all over the world. Remember Citizen Lab’s report on the use of NSO’s malware to go after supporters of a soda tax?
What bothers me most about cryptocurrency proponents are that most of the claims are being made by people who will not personally suffer the consequences of being wrong if someone follows their advice. If you care about people in dangerous legal environments, that really needs to focus on changing the system rather than advocating use of electronic systems which even experts cannot use safely in those environments.
As long as there is illegal content on the blockchain, they can simply state that you are hosting a node connected to a network that downloads and shares illegal content, which will be true, and therefore that you possess it, which will also be true. And that can be enough to get you prosecuted regardless of how many crypto bros are going to try to convince you, or them, otherwise.
It's widely known there's child porn on the bitcoin blockchain, not familiar with any prosecutions that have happened.
Pretending that the law trumps all technology is as naive as pretending technology trumps all law. No extreme is true: you can build technological problems to solve many social or political problems (example: VeraCrypt with plausible denialability)
If not, an enforcement agency could always upload it itself to create the pretext. It might be expensive, but nation states can afford mining hardware.
There's no fundamental link between the cost of storing data on a blockchain and time. However, practically, it does look like the most common blockchains have gotten more expensive over time: Bitcoin, Ethereum, even Dogecoin. However, you could imagine a blockchain that gets cheaper over time i.e. by issuing more coins or even stays the same.
Governments, under any law they wish to create. In some countries (eg Australia) they can (and have) created retrospective legislation that makes what was perfectly legal when you did it now illegal, and then prosecute you for it.
Well, sure. They could make owning a computer illegal, or whatever. Anything outside your skull is censorable. The readme doesn't pretend that this works if you can't access the Handshake chain.
> where you can make up rules for the government to follow
Exactly. It always reminds me of that scene in the Simpsons where Burns goes through tons of security in the nuclear plant, then a dog walks in through a screen door.
is that true though? CP on Etherium blockchain is a well known problem, and no prosecution jurisdiction is doing anything about it. Who would even have jurisdiction on something so decentralised? Sure you could shut down some nodes, but not all of them. And even then new nodes would pop up vastly more quickly than you can kill them. So prosecutors really are powerless. I think. Am I wrong?
> So prosecutors really are powerless. I think. Am I wrong?
Yes, you're wrong.
> Sure you could shut down some nodes, but not all of them. And even then new nodes would pop up vastly more quickly than you can kill them.
Your error is here. If prosecutors actually decide to start shutting down nodes because of CP and make successful prosecutions, it will deter people from running new nodes in that jurisdiction. If hosting a copy of the Etherium blockchain had a high chance of landing you in jail for CP possession, would you start up a new node to replace one that was shut down? Instead of "new nodes ... pop[ping] up vastly more quickly than you can kill them," most operators would get scared and quickly shut down their nodes and wipe their HDs, and the rest would get prosecuted. Maybe you'd have a few stragglers hiding out on Tor, but at that point the network is unusable for any legitimate use.
Don't believe me? There's even been a recent example of something like that. China banned Bitcoin mining, and the miners there shut down or GTFO of China:
> Available data shows that crypto mining no longer exists in China and that China's crypto mining ban completely upended the global Bitcoin mining industry. China went from controlling up to two-thirds of all Bitcoin mining in the world in April to not contributing to the industry at all as of July 2021, according to data compiled by the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Alternative Finance. And anecdotal evidence suggests that the vast majority of Chinese Bitcoin miners relocated their operations to places like Kazakhstan, the U.S., and Canada or simply sold off their equipment at discounted prices and left the industry.
Bitcoin survival isn't predicated on mass mining farms of the sort that are easily shutdown in china and elsewhere. Running nodes yields more revenue the higher proportion of the hash rate you have. Making it illegal just makes it that much more profitable to run nodes in difficult to shut down ways, such as a cell phone powered by a solar array running tor and a miner.
>it's about people's willingness to run illegal services.
Which looks to be quite high.
>Nope, sorry. The market doesn't guarantee whatever random distributed thing you like will be resilient.
While I'm sure 'nope, sorry' felt gratifying for you to type, the market cares very little about your individual opinion. Even illegal drugs, tangible items that a drug dog might sniff out, can't be choked off.
>whatever random distributed thing you like
The 'whatever random distributed thing I like' is something with a market cap of 2.21 Trillion dollars, which is like 1/10th the GDP of the united states. You make it sound like it's my random pet individual project.
> While I'm sure 'nope, sorry' felt gratifying for you to type, the market cares very little about your individual opinion. Even illegal drugs, tangible items that a drug dog might sniff out, can't be choked off.
Lol. Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies aren't illegal drugs, and thinking they would be as resilient as them is missing many important differences. For one, networks are far easier to surveil than physical spaces. For another, about the only thing cryptocurrencies are actually good for is speculation, so there'd be few incentives to keep them going in the face of severe penalties. That quite unlike drugs, which get you high and in some cases can get you addicted, so there's some natural demand.
> The 'whatever random distributed thing I like' is something with a market cap of 2.21 Trillion dollars, which is like 1/10th the GDP of the united states. You make it sound like it's my random pet individual project.
Speculators driving up the price is not proof of resilience. Bitcoin is a technology in search of a real problem to solve, not an actual good solution to anything.
Bitcoin/crypto as you say are not illegal drugs. There's no inherent moral outrage like there would be for murder/rape/theft/selling crack to an addict slowly poisoning himself and visibly robbing his neighbors. Convincing the populace to wage the kind of war-on-drugs style attack that would be necessary to snuff it out will be even more difficult to sell to populace than it was to sell the need to imprison drug dealers.
All I can say about stopping crypto-currency, is good luck. The Crypto Stasi or whatever oppressive mechanism that would be needed to actually snuff it out will have to shoot me in the head to make me stop. I'd happily keep trading and mining crypto from cellphone smuggled up someone's ass into the prison or whatever else is needed to keep the system going.
> All I can say about stopping crypto-currency, is good luck. The Crypto Stasi or whatever oppressive mechanism that would be needed to actually snuff it out will have to shoot me in the head to make me stop. I'd happily keep trading and mining crypto from cellphone smuggled up someone's ass into the prison or whatever else is needed to keep the system going.
What an utterly bizarre attitude.
Also, you do realize if what you describe is what it takes to keep cryptocurrency going; it would be actually, really dead-dead, despite you and a few hold outs trading it from prison ass-phones forever and keeping the technical infrastructure barely alive? To put it in crypto-terms: at that point Bitcoin will be a Shitcoin.
You asked for resiliency, I merely provided an example of it. Of course not everyone can be imprisoned, so it's pretty unrealistic to think only ass-phones would mine bitcoin/crypto.
> Making it illegal just makes it that much more profitable to run nodes in difficult to shut down ways, such as a cell phone powered by a solar array running tor and a miner. … The market will provide.
This is wishful thinking: Bitcoin has no value beyond what someone is currently willing to pay for it. If it becomes risky, your options for converting Bitcoin into local currency will shrink correspondingly. Similarly, if you're in a climate where you need to worry about this I would not want to use a cellular node which is so trivially linked to your account and physical location.
>Bitcoin has no value beyond what someone is currently willing to pay for it.
A little under a trillion for BTC alone, all in.
>If it becomes risky, your options for converting Bitcoin into local currency will shrink correspondingly.
So it will basically shrink to fit black market demand. Bad for speculators, good for crims.
>Similarly, if you're in a climate where you need to worry about this I would not want to use a cellular node which is so trivially linked to your account and physical location.
Then someone smarter than me wins the mining rewards.
> >Bitcoin has no value beyond what someone is currently willing to pay for it.
> A little under a trillion for BTC alone, all in.
That’s not what we’re talking about, but it shows where your misunderstanding lies. The current value of a Bitcoin is what you can sell it for — there’s no intrinsic value and while Bitcoin is a fiat currency it’s much weaker than anything else because there isn’t any sort of guaranteed demand created by things like the need to pay taxes or handle government contracts. If 1 BTC is $10,000 today, it could be $5,000 or $50,000 tomorrow based solely on how much someone is willing to give you at that time. That’s why it’s so volatile historically and one of two reasons why it’s not widely used other than for speculation — no business wants unpredictable spikes in the difference between what they paid for their inputs and what they receive from their customers.
This is important to understand because what you’re doing is tossing out a big number by multiplying all of the coins by the recent hard currency exchange rate. That’s not accurate, however, unless you know that there are buyers collectively sitting on $1T USD willing to buy all of those Bitcoins. If I buy one Bitcoin for $1M that does not mean that the value of everyone else’s Bitcoins suddenly changed because nobody else is crazy enough to overpay by that much. Similarly, if I think the bubble is popping and start selling, I may not find a buyer if many people decide to wait and see — and since very few people need Bitcoin, there isn’t any pressure to push them off of the fence like there is with a fiat currency backed by a sovereign state.
> So it will basically shrink to fit black market demand. Bad for speculators, good for crims.
Not good for them if they can’t convert into the things they want to buy, and it’s especially risky to leave a signed transaction log for the police when there’s little legal traffic to hide in.
So short bitcoin, if you think it's worth nothing. Good luck, acdha. We're both saying it's worth whatever people are willing to pay for it, I'm just acknowledging that happens to be quite a lot.
>but it shows where your misunderstanding lies
I understand market cap is different than the current volume buyers will buy at this moment. You've basically just provided an essay on what market cap is. There's no misunderstanding. Is this supposed to disprove the gigantic valuation assigned to bitcoin?
>Not good for them if they can’t convert into the things they want to buy, and it’s especially risky to leave a signed transaction log for the police when there’s little legal traffic to hide in.
This is why most black markets now use Monero or similar privacy coins. If a currency will buy drugs, then it will always be able to buy money since drugs are worth money.
Funny thing is, I've done Bitcoin transactions since then, and the transaction fees and confirmation times (which are the fees charged by and service provided by the miners) were pretty normal. So the Bitcoin network seems to have totally avoided the "unusable for any legitimate use" fate you predict, even though half the hashrate went offline over the course of a few weeks.
That’s why I put it in terms of how much they care. I’d be surprised if there is something on the Ethereum chain itself because it’d cost a small fortune but if there was, the authorities could easily require all companies to block access to those records, filter network traffic for all but the most determined users, etc. because it’s a complex always-on network system with a fair amount of volume.
The underlying problem here is discoverability. If I can find your content, so can the police. If sharing it is personally risky, most people won’t and they feel who do won’t for long. Censorship has never relied on absolutely preventing anyone from saying something prohibited — it’s always the potential for retroactive consequences. This is why successful movements have generally needed outside support, anonymous communications (e.g. printed samizdat which is most risky if they catch you when you’re actually in possession of it), or some kind of social network which is hard to infiltrate (family, religion, etc.).
Looking at the record, this transaction cost 198724 bytes. https://btc.network/estimate suggests that a transaction with 198724 bytes would cost about $200.
Not bad! Anyone up for posting a picture of Tank Man to the blockchain for $200?
Heh, thanks for digging up a the current price. I guess the other point there would be that you don’t need a high-res video to get in trouble in many cases — an Uighur with a VGA-quality image is probably still toast if the police catch them.
Could the reasoning behind that not simply be that there is only finite resources to use so you want to target where you get the most effect for the least resource and “CP on blockchains” ends up way down in that priority list?
Let's say you use something like a striped raid on different nodes.
Node A contains the odd bytes for something copyrighted like "the love guru" those bytes by themselves aren't the copyrighted content and no one claims rights to them.
Node B has has the even ones.
Downloading either doesn't yield the copyrighted file, but on a person's own machine if they combine them it does.
This is the question / thought experiment that the Owner-Free File System explored[0] (based on the XOR operation), and the legal / philosophical issues are discussed in the famous essay "What Colour are your bits?".[1]
An idea that is often missed in these discussions is that if you have two random-looking files which, when XORed together, produce an interesting file, it isn't clear which of the two source files were created by someone with access to the interesting file. For example, if you produce a sufficiently large random file, I can create another file which, when XORed with your file, implicates you in copyright infringement.
My non-expert conclusion is that unless a third party can prove which file was created first, there is no way of knowing who to prosecute, like having an eye witness trying to separate identical twins (which I believe has been a problem in court cases before). There is, however, the counter-argument that merely publishing large random-looking data files is evidence of a conspiracy to aid copyright infringement, although the same could be said of running a Tor node.
Let's say instead of 'copyrighted file' it's CSAM material instead. Is it 'illegal'? Maybe you can convince a judge otherwise.... after your home has been raided, you've already done at least some time in jail where all the inmates know you've been arrested for CSAM, your friends & family know you've been arrested for that, that's what comes up under a Google search for your name for all time, thus making you unemployable.....
Yes, after spending $500k-1 million on a defense attorney, it's possible that you could convince a judge that that content isn't 'illegal', sure. (How many judges- average age over 60- can learn what a 'striped raid' is?) But none of those other consequences can be reversed, even if you 'win' at trial
The system you're describing is a system in which random policemen can arbitrarily destroy the life and legacy of whoever they want. Such a system does already exist in many countries. It doesn't depend on people actually hosting decentralized communications facilities at all; police officers can do the same to anyone who refused them free accommodations at their hotel, or declined their offer of partnership in their nightclub venture. It's irrelevant whether there's any forbidden information actually being communicated, striped or otherwise.
In other places, there does exist a "rule of law" that limits such abuses to a significant degree.
> In other places, there does exist a "rule of law" that limits such abuses to a significant degree.
Yes — my original point was that this is what will protect you and that's what you want to focus on strengthening. If you don't have a reasonable civil society, technology is unlikely to help and the various ways to get it wrong mean that there's a substantial risk of false confidence.
In places where some degree of rule of law exists, to the extent that that's at all compatible with some knowledge being forbidden, not actually having the forbidden knowledge yourself will also protect you.
What are the countries where you can interact with a blockchain that contains CSAM, but you can avoid charges by explaining in technical detail what a 'striped raid' is to the relevant authorities? Can you name these countries? My personal guess, no offense, is that they don't exist
Nobody has any idea, but so far almost all of the Freenet, IRC, and Usenet police raids have been on end-users who originated or used forbidden information, not people who merely ran a server. In most countries running a Tor bridge is safe, and in a smaller number of countries running a Tor exit node is relatively safe, although numerous end-users of Tor have been arrested for one or another crime.
Yes. What happens is that the FBI uses the system to download the illicit content and every IP they connect to gets a letter to their ISP demanding that they identify the customer.
When they show up at your door, you get to hope they believe you saying that you had no idea your system was hosting that content and/or that you never had the decryption key. If you say anything which a judge/jury believes untrue, that’s a federal crime in its own right.
Better hope that you don’t need any of the hardware they seized as evidence (possibly for years - see Steve Jackson Games), and that your employer doesn’t hear the news and sack you.
Having copyrighted works isn't the inherently illegal part. It's the act of obtaining them outside the licensed methods and then holding them. At that point, according to some, is when it becomes theft.
Hosts with unknown blobs of bytes can, and have, been taken to task by various authorities.
Maybe it's grey-area but looks more towards the illegal side to me.
The underlying mistake is thinking about this like a game where you can make up rules for the government to follow. What actually happens is one of two paths:
1. You’re outside their jurisdiction, so anything will work because your local police don’t care. Maybe you have to avoid traveling to certain places or doing business with certain companies but you can almost certainly live a full life with minimal impact unless you’re doing something like leaking the secrets of a drug cartel or Russian oligarch.
2. You’re subject to their authority, which gives them a rich suite of tools ranging from arresting you, having ISPs filter DNS or network connections, launching denial of service attacks on your infrastructure, etc. How much effort they’ll expend depends on exactly what you’re doing and how authoritarian the government is, not the technology.