Illicit Material on ETH and Legal Issues

1

Hi all,

I’ve had an issue floating around in my head for a month that could pose some severe issues for ETH (or any other Turing complete distributed chain) though I haven’t yet discussed it publicly as I wanted to at least have a starting point for a possible solution available before pointing out the problem.

The issue: A turing complete blockchain can do about anything a traditional computer can do (though not in practical terms). One of these things is storing files. For example, consider this image of Vitalik. It is about 18 KB. It is practical to store files of this size or larger on ETH. As an example, I have a copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (~50 KB zipped) and stored on the mainnet. I had made utilities to facilitate these uploads, but have (hopefully) temporarily removed them from public locations online.

The point I’m getting to is that it is not hard to store images or other files on the chain, and that a malicious actor could upload something such as child pornography, and have it distributed nearly instantaneously to every node in the network.

I am going to focus on US law heading forward but I’m sure this could be extended to other countries.

According to the DOJ, “electronically stored data that can be converted into a visual image of child pornography are also deemed illegal visual depictions under federal law” and “Federal law prohibits the production, distribution, reception, and possession of an image of child pornography using or affecting any means or facility of interstate or foreign commerce (See 18 U.S.C. § 2251; 18 U.S.C. § 2252; 18 U.S.C. § 2252A).” (Source). This would effectively make it illicit to run an Ethereum node should an actor upload this material to the chain.

My thoughts on solutions: Now, the first and simplest solution I thought of would be creating a list of prohibited ETH addresses that contained illicit material, however, that would also effectively act as a list of the illicit material, which would make it very easy to access.

The solution I am leaning towards now is generating hashes from addresses and storing them in a smart contract or directly in node software, which would mean that you couldn’t generate a list of these materials so easily, but individuals could choose not to host the contracts that have addresses which resolve to these hashes. The issue I see with this is it would be easiest to be done in a centralized manner, but this would potentially allow censorship by a rogue centralized actor of anything, including non-illicit materials. The solution to me then seems to be a decentralized list of hashes, perhaps in a smart contract with some method to post them. That’s where I’ve gotten to outlining a solution, but I think this issue needs to be discussed more seriously at this point before ETH (or blockchain in general) becomes more prevalent.

2

The entire purpose of opensource is to kill copywrite. Copywrite is an evil invention.

3

I’d agree with that (I actually have an econ paper in review at a journal right now that focuses on empirical negatives of patents) which is why I framed the discussion in terms of child pornography, which I don’t think you’re going to have any success arguing against, especially with governments and legality.

4

On the Tor network, there’s a search engine called Ahmia that does this but simply stores hashes of the websites containing child pornography in a file.

The main issue with doing this in Ethereum is that it is very easy to simply create a address (user or smart contract) as it is pseudonymous.

Also, it brings up another question, who is in charge of this smart contract? Ethereum is open-source software so this might be an issue.

5

I wonder if there are any precedents around the word “converted” in this context. You could in theory have a public key-value store in which any data can act as a key and be “converted” to some sort of illicit material. For example, using hash(whitehouse dot gov html) as the key.

I think in practice, it may come down to how easy it is to access that data for everyday people. “If illicit material is on the blockchain and nobody is around to see it, does it exist?”

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I think it could be an unowned (in the sense that it is posted without special rights for the original creator) contract that has some sort of suggestion mechanism and then a round of voting or something. It could also be tied to POS since stakeholders would have the incentive to prevent running an ETH node from becoming illegal.

7

I’d imagine converted means something like a zip file of child pornography would technically be considered child pornography, though I haven’t dug into the DOJs definition, though I’m sure it’s explicit somewhere.

I think in practice the second someone A. puts child pornography onto ETH and B. It is reported to the FBI or another agency which then verifies it then C. publicly announces it, it effectively becomes illegal to run a node in the US, since you would be distributing child pornography. Replace the FBI with a corresponding law enforcement agency in another country and the same thing would likely be true. Which is why I’m bringing this up now, since this is bound to happen sooner or later.

8

The price of censorship resistance is that it is censorship resistant.

Nodes could, in theory, have an optional/voluntary blacklist but any node that is using such a blacklist is effectively running a light node (they don’t have the full chain). If enough people use such a blacklist we have the same problems as if too many people run light nodes where new people can’t sync.

9

Warning to OP: your post isn’t research related.