Hey everyone,
I just recalled a German piece from a reputable tech newspaper that mentioned there might be an actual child porn image stored in one of the early Bitcoin blocks, along with some odd links.
A study from a German university (RWTH Aachen/Goethe University) uncovered this.
Since it's in German, I won't change the original text, but you can translate it with Google if you need to.
My question is: does anyone have more info on that image and know which block it’s in? Looking for more validation on this.
If this is a real CP, this might be sickening. Report this to the authority or cybertip.org, this is considered an online child exploitation. In the first place why put it here first without reporting it first? Curiousity can be a good excuse but you should report this.
Why do you republish this misleading story, the first time I heard about this story in the world 2017, which dates back to 2013, and that for the alleged research is what earns it legitimacy for many organizations.
All of these claims are based on the fact that the blockchain is open-source, anyone can write to it and cannot be modified.
It's like saying government websites are full of CP.
Its already reported. The university worked together with the german police in that case.
Maybe its not 100% clear, thats my question.
If its real, having the blockchain on a computer is illegal. And thats the way the goverment can attack it
Probably real, still doesn't make storing the blockchain illegal.
It's been discussed time and again, whatever illegal content may be stored on the Bitcoin blockchain is merely there as an unreadable blob of binary data and can not be accessed without considerate technical effort. Unless you go through the effort of extracting this content and converting it into a format that can be read by media software there's no laws being broken.
Imagine a rogue Microsoft Engineer steganographically including CP in a DLL that gets updated during a Windows update. Obviously that engineer would have to answer some questions, but that wouldn't make Windows users liable for having this hidden data on their hard drives.
In germany we have very hard laws for CP. The form of CP is free even writing a CP Text is forbidden or having a encrypted code. The point is not the technic, olny the sexual aspect of minors.
So yes , a windows that would need that CP dll file would be illegal to store.
Thats my point. I think goverment knows about that, maybe some goverment even placed it there.
And when they need to forbid Bitcoin, they do with this argument
Well, the good news is that looking at the paper itself it seems like the researchers didn't even find CP, there was only a claim they found on an online forum that they didn't actually verify for ethical (and possibly legal) reasons:
The bad news is that of course that's not stopping anyone from adding CP in the future.
The good news is that it's still unlikely that German courts (or any court, really) would put anyone behind bars for a binary blob of data on the Bitcoin blockchain. Law is based on the legislative intent rather than technicalities and in this case it's about content rather than binary data.
This Heise comment said it best:
Let's ban the number Pi because it contains every kind of CP imaginable! All you need to do is find the correct starting point in its digits.
So espcially BTC Maxis say its not illegal I personal need a check.
So without the right block its not checkable if its CP or just porn.
Anyone can help?