Double-Edged Blockchain; Child Abuse Pictures “Impossible to Remove” from BSV Ledger
bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision (SV) finds itself in the midst of yet another controversy as a by The Hard Fork published on February 4, 2019, states that the digital currency’s blockchain was used by cybercriminals to upload child abuse imagery. Worse, because of the immutability of , it is impossible to remove the heinous data from the ledger record unless it is hard forked.
What Led to it?
According to the report, a change to the input data parameters of protocol encouraged the cyber wrongdoers to upload child exploitation material to the cryptocurrency’s blockchain. Since then, block explorers on the BSV blockchain have been on a constant lookout for illegal content on the network.
The change to the BCH SV protocol was done to increase the volume of data accepted in transactions or data blocks by almost 450 times. The increased space would allow for images, audio, and video to be permanently stored on BSV’s blockchain.
The to upload child abuse imagery to BSV’s blockchain was processed by – a BSV specific payment app. Later, the image was discovered by a website that displays files hosted by the BSV network.
Detailing the matter, a source told Hard Fork that the files hosting website reached out to Money Button to check if the app was used to write data to the BSV blockchain. After inspecting their transactions, Money Button found that their platform was indeed used for the condemnable act.
The source added:
“Almost certainly, whoever posted this was trying to prove a point about inserting something illegal into the blockchain since that content can never be removed.”
Blockchain’s immutability makes it near impossible to reverse the content uploaded. The only way to undo the act is if BSV’s network undergoes a hard fork.
However, to ensure that the illicit content is not visible to the general public, BSV block explorers have concealed the pertinent images recorded through the transaction from Money Button.
bitcoin SV has made a name for itself in the cryptoverse for all the wrong reasons.
Crypto enthusiasts would remember the despicable that originated between the BTC Cash () and BTC SV (BSV) camps in November 2018.
The back and forth between Roger Ver and Satoshi Nakamoto, Craig Wright, is widely regarded as the disaster that led to a dramatic in the price of cryptocurrencies, from which they have not yet recovered.
Re: Der Aktuelle Kursverlauf blockgrösse Eine Hashrate von oberhalb 60% für BU halte ich für sehr unwahrscheinlich. Warum? Derzeit sind es etwa 40. BW.Pool voted schon lange für 8 MB, wäre also wohl dabei, wenn […]
Stanford University hosted the fourth edition of the
conference over the weekend of November 4–5: “ 2017: Scaling the Edge.”
The annual conference, sometimes referred to as a “workshop,” has in its short history grown into somewhat of an institute within the bitcoin space. It aims to be the main stage for bitcoin’s technical and academic communities, with little room for commercial interests — and perhaps even less for the “scaling drama” that has grown to be the norm online.
“This is the place where we want to focus on engineering, not politics,” said Anton Yemelyanov, this year’s planning committee chair, as he introduced the event on Saturday morning. “We want everyone to have objective discussions from an engineering standpoint.”
The first two conferences were hastily organized one after the other in the second half of 2015, both in direct response to the new-at-the-time block size limit dispute and a looming hard fork through XT. The edition, the first of the two conferences, was instrumental in bringing together bitcoin’s technical community, which had up until that point mostly communicated through chat channels and mailing lists. And the second edition in introduced bitcoin’s mostly Chinese mining community onto the stage for the first time, quite literally. Faced with a contentious hard fork, the events were instrumental in building community among developers and across continents.
And the conferences proved pivotal in averting the crisis — at least temporarily. Hong Kong saw the introduction of, presented by engineer and major Core contributor Dr. Pieter Wuille. This innovation was included as a centerpiece in bitcoin’s scaling, proposed by Blockstream CTO and bitcoin Core maintainer Gregory Maxwell right after the conference, and was endorsed by large parts of the bitcoin ecosystem. It finally on the bitcoin network this summer.
Now, two years and three Scaling bitcoin conferences after the Montreal edition, another controversial hard fork looms. — maintained by former bitcoin Core contributor and CEO Jeff Garzik — is scheduled to hard fork next week as per the in order to double bitcoin’s block weight limit — an effort dubbed “SegWit2x.”
Yet, this upcoming hard fork did not demand much attention in Stanford. Apart from subtle remarks buried throughout some of the talks, the topic of SegWit2x was almost completely absent from the Scaling bitcoin program. Illustratively, Bobby Lee, CEO of and one of the few outspoken SegWit2x proponents on stage,even refused to take any questions on the hard fork after his invited talk — instead focusing on bitcoin’s meteoric price rise over the past years.
The Talks and the Science
Scaling bitcoin instead continued on the path set out last year at the, hosted in. With a broader scope than scaling alone, privacy and fungibility were prominent topics, while smart contracts, fees, mining and more were part of the program as well.
Perhaps the biggest innovations presented throughout the weekend, at least within the realm of features that could feasibly be implemented on bitcoin without rigorous protocol changes, were presented by some of the veterans (by now) in the space.
Tadge Dryja, co-author of and currently employed by the, presented “Discreet Log Contracts.” If the math checks out like he thinks it does, these could effectively realize trustless oracle systems, arguably offering a superior (being simpler) alternative to the bulk of advanced smart contracts. Put bluntly, think these kinds of solutions could make resource-intensive systems like Ethereum obsolete.
Along similar conceptual lines, Blockstream mathematician Andrew Poelstra presented “scriptless scripts.” Utilizing clever cryptography — specifically, signature aggregation — smart contracts could be anchored into a basic blockchain without needing to embed the entire smart contract code itself. Originally designed for the protocol, the concept could be leveraged by bitcoin, too.
And speaking of veterans in the space, Nick Szabo — partnered with (among others) Bloomberg contributor Elaine Ou — presented his proposal to broadcast bitcoin transactions over radio waves. Not so subtly referencing China’s recent, the two detailed how bitcoin could travel around the globe (and over the great firewall of China) without so much as needing an internet connection.
When the topic of bitcoin’s block size limit — the “original” scaling issue that spawned the conferences — came up at all, it was mostly in the context of propagation speed. Perhaps no coincidence, the two most relevant presentations on this topic were based on work by some of the people involved with previous hard fork attempts. The Unlimited team presented their test results on the “Gigablock” network, which they believe safely supports blocks that exceed current limits by several orders of magnitude. And UMass Amherst professor Brian Levine presented the “Graphene” block propagation protocol, co-designed by bitcoin’s former lead developer Gavin Andresen.
To the extent that next week’s hard fork was discussed, Anthony Towns’s presentation probably came closest. Towns detailed how support for future protocol changes could be cleverly determined through market dynamics. Though, while interesting, this type of solution will not be ready in time for the SegWit2x hard fork.
The Hard Forks and the Politics
Indeed, in contrast to some of the previous events, a sense of urgency was mostly absent in Stanford.
This could be in part because most of bitcoin’s technical community has by now roughly settled on a path forward — and SegWit2x is no part of it. Similarly, the question is not so much whether bitcoin will scale predominantly through second layers; for them, at least, it will. Rather, topics of research now focus on how these second-layer technologies can be optimized for performance, privacy and more.
Additionally, as a somewhat loosely organized volunteer effort, the team overseeing the conferences consists of slightly varying people from one event to the next. And resulting from a difference in vision for the 2017 edition, some of the earlier organizers as well as a segment of bitcoin’s technical communitywere absent for this round.
Perhaps as a result, the sense of community building typical for some of the previous events was not as prominent in Stanford. And the question of how to deal with a looming hard fork was a more central topic at the similar but more informal conference in Paris several weeks ago. In little over two years, Scaling bitcoin instead transformed from what is best described as an emergency summit to something perhaps more akin to a regular academic conference — even though an emergency summit would not have seemed entirely inappropriate at this point in time.
For a complete overview and videos of all presentations, visit . (Or follow for transcripts.)
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