I'm kinda surprised nobody has posted illegal pornography onto the bitcoin block chain, and then issued legal proceedings against anyone they can identify running a node.
Would be a good way to shut down a competing coin.
What I found interesting, though predictable, was that we saw the same wave of "Oh but it's just a set of bits, it's only illegal data if you go looking for the decoder to compile the pieces together". Which could be said about a lot of data formats.
I remember seeing these same justifications 15+ years ago when laws were being tightened up around possession and distribution of child abuse imagery, that it's just a stream of bits, you can't criminalise that... You can, and you should.
(The extent to which it can be pursued, and to which those who are simply running cryptocurrency nodes should have any culpability for propagating said data is very much open to legal argument, of course.)
I think the idea that π contains all possible decimal strings in its expansion [which is highly probable but not proven AIUI] provides a little push back.
If I present the idea "circle", then hypothetically all (!!) you need is a decoder (substring location within π, and video processor) and you've got every illegal image ever made compiled into a handy video stream.
So logically (and I'm fully aware law isn't logic [and probably shouldn't be?]) there seems like you would need something else other than just possession of a number to make that possession illegal. (I'm not arguing that's the current law in any country, fwiw).
tl;dr -- at some point it is just a concatenation of bits.
First off, that has not been proven about pi, but it is heavily theorized. Second, you need the substring index, which, for a large file is guaranteed to exceed the original's file size to begin with. Transmitting that substring index is likely equivalent to compressing the file.
Courts aren't robots and people are judged by other people. Nobody will go to jail for holding a file with all possible files in it. But using that file with a specific substring index to extract something illicit, with intent, will almost certainly not make the courts happy. IANAL.
>But using that file with a specific substring index to extract something illicit, [...] //
The question at hand though, is if you don't extract the illicit thing [from the Blockchain] is possession of the Blockchain enough.
FWIW I think possession has to be the measure used for child pornography and similar content, at present. But what is meant precisely by possession may need some interpretation (does one "possess" a file if one has the magnet link?) and may evolve in the future if such Blockchain attacks become of interest to the legislature.
>you would need something else other than just possession of a number to make that possession illegal.
Yes, the index, which would itself be the encoding of the file. It's just Huffman coding optimising for the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter.
It provides no pushback at all when a picture has been taken, jpeg encoded and then sliced into pieces and inserted onto the blockchain as extra data on a number of transactions, in a way easily recognised and easily re-extracts.
Sure, those numbers could have come about some other way, but they didn't.
Your hypothetical decoder is actually going to contain a very large amount of very specific data as well, so much so that the 'circle' part of it is more or less irrelevant. You've just defined a (very poor) data encoding scheme.
If that is the case, then the information will be contained in the "decoder", not in pi itself. So that particular "decoder" should be banned, not pi. Other "decoders" that point to other parts of pi would not be banned.
How about if you have it but never used it, so you have the index but never expanded Pi that far, or doing the expansion would take longer than the age of the Universe, say?
So, how about if you never viewed the 'file' from the Blockchain, aren't we creeping gradually towards saying that would be fine too. Of course the law has elements necessary for practical enforcement too which we generally ignore when waxing philosophical.
Yeah really it is pointing out that the law is stupidly written conceptually as pi technically contains all of the child pornography in the world once you go out enough digits. In the real world it requires a judge to put a stop to utterly stupid abuses like arresting someone for having enough sources of noise on them which through a series of operations could be transformed into child pornography while not dismissing a 1s complimented video file of the defendant presenting their driver's license to a camera before molesting a child as tampered evidence.
Personally I believe the law is long overdue for refactoring but that it would be a twofold nightmare to first actually do it and second getting it approved through the mechanisms of legislation.
No. Posession of any data should never be criminal. Just like you wouldn't send someone to prison how having a book, you shouldn't send someone to prison for simply having a picture, no matter what it is a picture of.
I don't think I have to say that obviously child rapists are the worst scum of the earth and they should rot in prison forever. But the idea that you can send someone to prison for simply having a picture(or in some countries, a drawing!!!), is just simply idiotic.
> No. Posession of any data should never be criminal.
Nonsense, if that data is national secrets, if it's child abuse photographs, if it's people's stolen credit card numbers, or any number of other types of data, mere possession is a problem.
> Just like you wouldn't send someone to prison how having a book
I would if it was a book full of child abuse photos.
I'm sorry, what is idiotic for you is common sense in most of the western world, you'll have to do more than call the idea stupid to argue a case like that.
Damn this subject is extremely touchy. I remember recently on the r/dataset subreddit, there was an image set that was essentially a set of pornography images. I remember thinking okay there could be a useful image type classification project in here. Then I started noticing some CLEAR ambiguities in the age of the subjects, I made a post on the thread and was told to basically shut the fuck up and I was making something of nothing.
Apparently I also don't take this shit lightly, because immediately reported that shit. All of this to say, prior to this experience I was under the impression that people should be allowed to study / research datasets of questionable morality / ethics but was completely naive and idealistic around researchers being completely benevolent.
I respect much more the ethical hoops required to study/research this type of material and I think other researchers ought to also respect them.
As for drawings, I agree with you. As for actual pictures, I very much disagree. Child porn serves as a violation of the subject's privacy, and its demand encourages more supply. There's a lot of scientific work on how child porn markets online operate.
There's also the argument that it's hard to prove someone has paid for it (either with money, or with another currency - some online CP forums work by trading images rather than money), so the next best alternative is to illegalise simple possession. Granted, this also runs into some problems; the same justification can be used to illegalise child pornographic drawings, which are frequently used to groom children. Because it's very hard to prove grooming of a victim who has already been groomed, the justification would argue that the next best way to ensure child rapists are caught would be to illegalise possession of the drawings.
Therefore, many countries use the strong probability of second-order effects to illegalise both drawings and photos/videos.
In my view, criminalizing the imagination (any imagination) is a severe misstep in itself, if not morally, then on the basis of most Western societies - the harm principle. Real child porn is not a product of the imagination, it is a documentation of real abuse to victims.
>>Real child porn is not a product of the imagination, it is a documentation of real abuse to victims.
Except that obviously some countries take it too far and people have been convicted for production of child pornography for having a picture of themselves on their own phone(say an 18 year old who took a picture of themselves when they were underage). That's not purely theoretical "this could happen, but probably won't because people apply common sense". That does actually happen in real world. And there is no abuse involved, maybe except for the abuse of he justice system. This wouldn't happen if just simply having a picture wasn't criminal in itself.
>>the justification would argue that the next best way to ensure child rapists are caught would be to illegalise possession of the drawings.
Would it? Because I feel that if any one of us came across child porn accidentally the right solution is to burn the machine down and never ever tell anyone about it, since mere fact of having looked at it(downloaded it to your browser) is a jail sentence in most civilized nations. If it was legal I would have absolutely no problem reporting it the police, which I am sure would help actually catching rapists. Which actually brings me to my next point - as far as I know, as long as minors are not involved, posession of pictures of pretty much any illegal act is not in itself illegal. You can go and google a video of couple guys killing another with a screwdriver - perfectly legal to watch. You can probably go on some snuff websites and watch videos of actual rape - not illegal to watch as far as I know. What's the difference? Because someone might masturbate to one of these but not the others? Now I don't believe that for a second, and it's not like the demand argument doesn't apply here either.
Would be a good way to shut down a competing coin.