Okay, so I'm in the US and am hosting the full node on my computer. The full node is encrypted with all kinds of nasty stuff like child porn and terrorist plots, to name a couple, but only accessible to those with passwords who know it's there. Can a person be in serious trouble for having said on his computer even though they don't access it?
As I suspect you know,
this has come up before.
The bitcoin protocol makes it awkard/expensive to store more than just simple links.
One of
my favorite articles (What colour are your bits?) touches on this:
I think Colour is what the designers of
Monolith are trying to challenge, although I'm afraid I think their understanding of the issues is superficial on both the legal and computer-science sides. The idea of Monolith is that it will mathematically combine two files with the exclusive-or operation. You take a file to which someone claims copyright, mix it up with a public file, and then the result, which is mixed-up garbage supposedly containing no information, is supposedly free of copyright claims even though someone else can later undo the mixing operation and produce a copy of the copyright-encumbered file you started with. Oh, happy day! The lawyers will just have to all go away now, because we've demonstrated the absurdity of intellectual property!
The take-away is that somebody can encrypt illegal data with a one-time pad. There would be no way to verify the data is illegal without said one-time pad. The implication of Monolith is that you don't even need a one-time pad to store data: you can XOR a well known version of the Bible with your illegal content and store the result in the block-chain. Edit: you could even use bootstrap.dat as the not-quite-one-time pad (non-random or re-used one-time pads are insecure).
I am not a lawyer, but after some amount of scrambling, I don't think anybody will care (other than the unprunable outputs wasting space).
Note for those that may not be aware: ko/s stands for "kilo-octets per second", more commonly referred to as kilobytes per second, but the former is more precise. Bytes can be 7, 8, or 16 bits.
How much bandwidth does that hog?
