A miner who knows where in the chain these files are could zero out the bytes, retaining just the hash of that area. Normal operation on the blockchain could continue, except that the miner wouldn't be able to validate any new transaction trying to spend the output that contains the illegal content. This doesn't feel like a loss anyone is going to worry about. The only affected parties would be the parties who put the data there, and presumably they aren't going to reveal themselves.<p>In other words, Bitcoin operation can continue with pretty much a non-controversial software change that allows miners to choose to ignore particular outputs.<p>If a miner genuinely doesn't know where in the chain these files are, then I'm not sure it can be claimed that the miner is in "possession" of it and the legal principle of mens rea will mean that the miner won't be criminally culpable in most jurisdictions.
And no one had seen it coming? It's way better than bittorrent trackers, it requires many many people to agree that something needs to be removed, but adding any data to publicly held records is very cheap, so those that uploaded pictures can do it again.
How are they storing this? I understand the links, there is enough bits to do that, but an image stored on-chain? How?<p>Over several transactions and you need to put it together, or will there be enough space to store an image in a OP_RETURN script?<p>83 bytes doesn't sound like it's enough to store any abuse image.
Haha, we can all see where this is going<p>“Only miners need the whole blockchain, and the blockchain contains illegal data, therefore mining is equivalent to possession and distribution of child porn...”
This is bad. Like, really bad. That "feature" of bitcoin has added more complications to the network than it is worth, IMO. Either the law's gotta change, or miners are going to start being prosecuted.<p>... or, the bitcoin developers will just have to add a way of removing that data when a new block is mined, which I guess is what will eventually happen. What a mess.
This would appear to mean that the 12,500-ish people running a full Bitcoin node have child pornography on their machines. As do those with full nodes that haven't been active in the last 24 hours.