Ped0 Links Found In The Bitcoin Blockchain
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April 29, 2013 •
Most people don’t know that Bitcoin has a limited capability to publish information with blockchain. It was built into the system by the original designer, Satoshi Nakamoto who left the most famous being entry in the first block aka Genesis block.
“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”
On April 6, 2013 someone published 2.5 MB of sensitive Wikileaks cables in the bitcoin blockchain (check here). It cost him around $500, but the information that was published is now going to be in public domain forever. In fact everyone who installed official Bitcoin QT client, now has that cable in his computer. Embedding WikiLeaks cables into the blockchain is a genius way to secure data, and no government can deletes it. Now have a look at other side, world wide web is full of many illegal things, what if someone might embed them to blockchain?
Apparently, earlier this month someone uploaded load of links to ch1ld p0rn websites in bitcoin blockchain, now it stays forever. scintill, from bitcointalk forums did a research (check here) and he found the culprit block “It’s about as benign as it can be, just a dump ostensibly from some Hidden Wiki pages (“J@ilb@it”, “Hard Candy”) with links to ped0 communities and stuff. There are several other files, including the original bitcoin whitepaper and some DRM encryption keys”
The blockchain represent as a single file or set of files stored on individual’s hard drives. Everyone who uses bitcoin qt client needs to have a copy of the blockchain. Thus if it contains illegal content / link to illegal content, then each individual hosting these files is personally responsible for possession of that content, which may be illegal in many countries.
Update : For those who want to verify on their own, can extract blk00053.dat by executing a simple command ” strings -bytes=20 ~/.bitcoin/blk00053.dat ” in Linux / BSD.
Update 2 : Someone named Thai8acu, threatened to publish illegal data a long ago (check here).
We’ll update this post as soon as we get more details, stay tuned!
Links to “illegal content” are not illegal content.
Aren’t these links to “hidden wiki” posted just about everywhere in the clearnet? Just google it.