The Guardian reported today that German researchers have discovered that some unknown people are using the Bitcoin blockchain to store and link child abuse pictures, which may put the entire cryptocurrency at risk.
Blockchain is an open source distributed ledger that records every bitcoin transaction, but it can also store a small amount of non-financial data. This data is usually about bitcoin transactions, recording the use of Bitcoin or other metadata. But it It can also be used to store links and files.
Researchers from the University of Aachen in Germany found that there are currently about 1,600 files stored in the blockchain of Bitcoin. At least 8 of them are pornographic, one is suspected to be child abuse, and two are 274 child abuse content. Link, there are 142 links to darknet service.
'Our analysis shows that certain content (such as illegal pornography) may cause blockchain use to become no longer legal. ''There is no court ruling, but legislative texts from countries such as Germany, the United Kingdom or the United States show that such Illegal content such as children's images can make all users' use of the blockchain illegal.
'This especially jeopardizes the multi-billion dollar market for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.'
Although bitcoin spending does not necessarily require blockchain backups, some processes, such as some mining techniques, need to download full or partial blockchains.
'Because all the data of the blockchain is downloaded by the user and stored continuously, everyone is responsible for any bad content that other people add to the blockchain. 'So, once it contains illegal content, it will participate in A blockchain-based system becomes illegal as a whole. The researchers wrote.
Mining is crucial to Bitcoin's function because the process records transactions to the blockchain to verify transactions and generate new Bitcoin in the process, while using illegal content such as child abuse images in the blockchain may It will lead to major currency problems.
The researchers wrote: 'We anticipate that illegal blockchain content storage may endanger blockchain systems such as Bitcoin in the future.'
This is not the first warning about the ability of blockchains to store non-financial data. Interpol issued a warning in 2015 saying that 'blockchain design means that malware may be accessed and permanently hosted. There is currently no way available to clear this data'.
The agency warned that the technology could be used to 'share pictures of child sexual abuse where the blockchain can become a safe harbor for hosting such data.'
But this is the first time it has been confirmed that such content is real. The use of blockchain has therefore fallen into a moral and legal dilemma.
