About illegal material: I've read there were already illegal pics and links stored in the blockchain, since 2013 or so:
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2018/03/27/child-porn-on-bitcoin-why-this-doesnt-mean-what-you-might-think/From the article:
Princeton professor Arvind Narayanan tweeted that the mainstream media's response to the report was "unsurprisingly superficial," adding, "First, the law is not an algorithm. Intent is an important factor in determining legality."
[...]
Plus, every U.S. state's handling of the disseminating of illicit material is different, but recalling Narayanan's sentiment, most laws hold people accountable only if they “knowingly possess” or produce, sell, broadcast or access the content “with intent to view.”
If that's the case, they should easily be able to back their statements by posting the block hashes. Knowing how media operates when it comes to Bitcoin and crypto, it would not surprise me if they stated it as fact, just because someone told them it is theoretically possible, or if it happened on another chain and they just attribute it to 'Bitcoin', because that pulls more views.
Generally, claiming anything being stored on the Bitcoin blockchain is one of the easiest things to prove; it is much harder to prove something like the correctness of a cryptographic algorithm or the existence of certain data on some company's server. As the ones putting out such accusation, they should also provide the proof.
Furthermore, if it was the case that someone already uploaded illegal material, we all know that it is not trivial to upload whole files into the blockchain. Technical users here may know how to do it, but there is no purpose-made application and mechanism
specifically for uploading and forever storing any data to the blockchain, as well as for viewing it.
Only because something is possible, doesn't mean it should be done, and only because it has been done before, is not a justification to keep going and encouraging it. Civilization has done horrible things for centuries, and at certain points in time realized it was wrong and stopped doing it.
i think everyone understands that. but at some point they'll have a blockchain web browser that lets you browse through the images unfiltered. and not need the little cybernanny what's his name? ordinals.com
They're gonna have to host it anonymously on the dark web or risk the consequences, which is at the very least having their website taken down.
Seriously? You want to rely on
decoding not being trivial as a means to avoid accountability? I could say the same about plain files on your disk. You also need a specialized program to open and view those (your preferred photo viewing application). On disk, it's just plain bytes. Exactly like using a photo application locally, someone can easily self-host ordinals.com or write a similar software that locally parses the blockchain and displays 'ordinals' pictures saved on it. Larry is actually right here.
That's debatable at best in my opinion. Its main ethos, main value-proposition, is and always will be censorship-resistance.
Censorship-resistant, peer-to-peer
electronic cash. It's as if you stopped your sentence half-way through.
It has never been about censorship-resistant
cloud storage. Big distinction.
I can't debate against that, and I don't disagree, BUT the point is, is it right for the community to demand that miners censor those transactions containing data? It would be against permissionlessness and censorship-resistance.
I don't argue against censorship-resistant money. And I don't want censorship through miners. I honestly don't have a perfect solution right now, either, but I sure as hell won't encourage (ab)using Bitcoin as unfiltered cloud storage, forcing me to store anything that anyone pays a high enough amount for, on my own disks.
There are definitely cryptocurrencies where this is not possible, by heavily limiting the power of their scripting language, where (by design) something like multisig and payment channels are possible, but not arbitrary data storage. I am pretty sure that you can
only do payments on Monero, for instance.