Topic: Could Ordinals make having a copy of the Bitcoin blockchain justifiably illegal? (Read 206 times)

I also thought about it... I think illegal content will never be deleted. That's a real problem of any picture hub, even centralised hubs experience problems with deleting illegal contents. And when the same things happen with decentralised blockchain full of NFT, it becomes a tough problem, with no solution at all...

If you have any illegal content in your PC/home it doesn't matter if it is on a blockchain copy or in a folder, USB stick etc... So yes in this case having a copy of blockchain that has illegal content in it would be a crime. That's another reason to cancel Ordinals/NFT's on bitcoin. Or... You can delete the blockchain copy of yours and keep using bitcoin. In the end it is not mandatory to have a copy of the blockchain to use bitcoin.

Are you saying that there is a technical reason that the blockchain can't be pruned so that the illegal data is removed? I don't know enough about the technical details, but I thought that nodes can run a pruned blockchain that complies with the protocols, but that wouldn't include those artifacts created by the ordinal inscriptions. What part of the transaction are the ordinal inscriptions in that can't be pruned?

I think that the ordinal inscriptions are annoying and somewhat harmful to Bitcoin, but not fatal so long as running a pruned node doesn't include them. If it's not possible to prune that data without a hard fork, then we might as well fork now since hoping that such an event won't happen is a horrible strategy, because it will happen if it's an effective attack, and it will likely happen at the worst time when people are fleeing to Bitcoin in large numbers to save themselves from inflation.

They are artifacts introduced to the bitcoin blockspace which is receiving a serious hype on its users making our own bitcoin transaction fee higher as it advances in occupying each bitcoin blockspace causing extra activities to be taken place on the bitcoin network such as network congestion and high transaction fee.


The nodes get attacked and the bitcoin network cease to comply to the proper protocols it's meant to follow and malicious attack set in, which can cause serious manipulations on the system, loss of coins and many other threat in loosing trust on the blockchain which we never pray to happen.

The part of the article I was talking about is this:

I don't agree with this point. There is a fundamental difference between the blockchain and tor exit nodes, which is that with exit nodes the data is all encrypted and the person running the node has no way of knowing what traffic is going through the node. It's very different from a person downloading a file that contains illegal images that are unencrypted, they know are part of the file, and are relatively easy to view. There would be an excuse for new transactions that are authenticated that contain illegal material, but once they are identified, I think anyone holding on to the data must delete it or suffer legal consequences.


I agree that intent matters, but I don't trust any government to be fair if they have a strong incentive to weaponize the legal system that that government itself runs. I do believe that many governments are stupid enough to jail people just for running a node. And with some material, I think the general population would probably agree that they should be jailed. So I could very much imagine a situation where anyone who runs an unpruned node could reasonably be thrown in jail. For example, let's say people anonymously pay a pornographer to put illegal images on the blockchain. If there were no legal consequences to running a node with the illegal content on it, the customers could then run a full node and would have all that material available for them to view anytime they wanted to without any legal risk. The important part is that intent couldn't be determined in that case. The police wouldn't really be able to tell if their intent was running a full node as part of the Bitcoin network or to legally possess an illegal porn stash, so I think that eventually it could very well not be possible to have an unpruned copy of the Blockchain without serious legal risk.

The way I see it, it doesn't look good for the future of ordinal inscriptions because of that possibility, but I'm satisfied that that scenario doesn't threaten the future of Bitcoin as a currency, which is what I care about.

I'm not sure the article you linked suggests that we can remove material from the blockchain. As far as I understand it, the author basically says that the law would not be that rigid when it comes to blockchain. People running a node share similarities with those who run a ToR exit node or something else, and nobody is going to jail just because of that. I think he brings up a good point regardless. I do believe intent does matter and the government is not stupid enough to jail people just because they run a node.

Thank you. Being new to Bitcoin, I had no idea this had already happened and been dealt with. This allowed me to answer get the answer to what I wanted to know but didn't know how to formulate the question. My fundamental question was can the illegal material be removed so that blockchain isn't corrupted without having to do a hard fork or something like that, and the answer is yes.

There's an article I found that addresses this issue pretty well: https://www.wired.com/story/why-porn-on-the-blockchain-wont-doom-bitcoin/

It has always been possible to create transactions with data such as text or images. There's nothing new about that.  This is just yet another way of accomplishing the same thing.


It already happened, over a decade ago. Hasn't been a problem yet.  You can just run a SPV wallet or other form of light wallet if you don't want to download the blockchain. Or, you can run a pruned node if you want a full verification node but don't want to store the full blockchain contents.

If things get worse, the community might split to pieces and we might see another fork from Bitcoin. Who want to have a blockchain which does not allow NFTs will stay with that chain. Who want to support NFTs on Bitcoin blockchain like Ordinals and more new use cases in future will support another chain.

Hopefully we won't have such forks and developers, community will have solutions for it and reach to a consensus to move on.

Honestly I don't think if the protocol remains like now, things will be better in 2024 and 2025 bull run. Bull run usually increases demand to use the blockchain and in 2023, we are only in a bear market but mempool already is overloaded with Ordinals and BRC20 token transactions.

It doesn't have to be a video, just a photo would suffice.

Some people have money to burn. As simple as that.

Side question: why in the world would you pay $113 to upload a photo?? lol

Is that really the sort of fee people are paying to do NFT jpegs on Bitcoin? That's just sad. Why even bother?

On Gamma.io I uploaded a 300kb, 1920 × 1200 photo that was fairly good quality and the fee to create the inscription was $113, and it was still smaller than the maximum size. So, if someone wanted to inscribe a sat with an illegal image of decent quality that they could definitely do it.

You only have 1MB to fit it in, and that's if you basically want to pay like 5BTC in fees. So more realistically, you have only a few kilobytes to work with, which is hardly enough for even low-quality GIFs.

     First of all right now bitcoin is not okay because of those ordinals. And I know many bitcoin experts will agree with what I am saying.
The effect of this is obvious in the fees which are very high which is not really good.

     Was that done to encourage the community here to have NFT loveliness. The majority of bitcoin holders don't really care about NFT. If this increase in bitcoin fees continues, how can we persuade others to enjoy Bitcoin if the transaction fees to be deducted are too expensive.

     It seems like what is happening now, BRC20 or the ordinals are just destroying what Bitcoin has worked so hard for in this industry just because of that. It's likely that if this doesn't change, for sure the merchants who accepted Bitcoin as one of their payment options have stopped because of the high fees, and it's likely that within a short period of time it will not be unclear that it will suddenly decrease bitcoin holders are large.

Ordinals are pretty new, so they probably haven't thought of it yet, but it's only a matter of time if it's a vulnerability.

Bitcoin has many enemies (including Feds).

Any idea why they don't upload pedo pr0n to make the blockchain illegal?

I don't think anyone has yet, but what happens when they do? goatse was censored on Ordinals.com, but from what I understand it is now a permanent part of the Blockchain forever and accessible to anyone who has a copy of the blockchain and a viewer that doesn't sensor it. So the question no one is answering is what happens when actually illegal things are put into the Blockchain, rather than just gross things, making the blockchain itself illegal to have a copy of?

I'm hoping there's a way to either stop Ordinals before that happens or remove Ordinals from the blockchain after the fact without a hard fork or a totally new blockchain that isn't vulnerable in the same way.

Has anyone uploaded pedo pr0n Ordinals in the blockchain?

The worst I've seen is goatse (and was quickly censored on Ordinals.com)...

I think you're missing the point here somewhat. There are different jurisdictions with varying degrees of loyalty to cryptocurrencies, but there is much less of a difference in jurisdictions when exploitative content is concerned, especially regarding children. For, example, let's say the U.S. dollar collapses. The U.S. may not like crypto currencies at that point and try to restrict them. However, El Salvador seems pretty good with crypto currencies and would benefit a lot by being friendly to crypto, especially if the U.S. isn't. However, I don't think even El Salvador would be okay with people there having and sharing child porn, so another crypto currency would be fine there, but Bitcoin would no longer be welcome.

So if it's just a case of a government, or even several governments being against crypto, the miners can always move to another jurisdiction that is friendly to crypto, but if it's a case where the Bitcoin blockchain contains content that is illegal in every jurisdiction, then there is no place to go. I'm not talking about cryptos in general. There's always some risk from governments to any crypto currency, and I'm fine with that because there are other jurisdictions. If Bitcoin is rendered unusable because no one can legally store its blockchain anywhere in the world, then another crypto currency will come along to replace it, but I want Bitcoin to survive.

There are different jurisdictions with varying degrees of loyalty to cryptocurrencies, and the degree of loyalty may change over time depending on the efforts of regulators. Innovative areas of progress such as crypto are always associated with increased risks, including legal ones. And since different people have different levels of risk tolerance, it's hard to give a universally good answer to your question. If you are prone to increased anxiety and have a tendency to cultivate phantom phobias, you might be better off looking for a more conservative type of activity.