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Some people should just not be allowed to use the blockchain. Someone recently used an exploit of Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (SV), the hard fork of Bitcoin Cash (BCH), in order to store images of child abuse on the blockchain forever.
According to The Next Web’s Hard Fork, this very sad case happened after the Bitcoin SV community decided to increase the amount of data that each transaction could send by 450 times. This made transactions of up to 100Kb be allowed, so someone decided that they wanted to put child porn on the blockchain.
The case was first noticed on a site that displays images stored on the blockchain. Someone saw the image and then the whole community started to monitor the network for illegal content. According to the reports, the image was processed on a transaction made on Money Button, a payment app that was specifically created for this token.
This site is considered a very easy tool to write stuff on the blockchain, according to the Hard Fork, but no one expected a criminal to do this. The site has affirmed that they suspect that the criminal was “trying to prove a point” about inserting illegal stuff on a blockchain.
While it is impossible to delete the image, the temporary solution was to ask the block explorer sites to censor the image and to stop showing it. However, a knowledgeable user would still be able to find the image directly on the blockchain.
Problems For Bitcoin Satoshi Vision
This case may cause several issues for Bitcoin Satoshi Vision because a person could simply do it again and fill the network with illegal content. BSV was born from one of the ugliest Bitcoin Cash hash wars and it had a very controversial hard fork. The fork was made in order to “remove scaling limitations” of the original Bitcoin.
By inserting this kind of image, one could make a point that the network is vulnerable because it has enabled the users to send these images.
The whole original idea was to improve the block size limit of the network. As a way to stop spam transactions, the original creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, used a block size limit of 1 MB. Bitcoin Cash drove this limit up to 32 MB soon after Satoshi Vision would push even more.
Bigger blocks, according to the logic, would make the network faster and more efficient, which could help Bitcoin to finally realize its prophecy and become “real money”. Now, you can have blocks with at least 128 MB on Bitcoin SV. Now, miners have agreed on the new limit of 100 KB per transaction, which basically created the problem.
Jimmy Nguyen, the CEO of nChain, which oversees the BSV protocol, affirmed that the BSV blockchain is only a data ledger and that it only transmits and stores data, so there is a chance that someone will use it for something illegal.
The same, he argues, could be said for the internet, Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash. They do not endorse or encourage any kind of illegal content, but they cannot stop all of it.
He has also affirmed that it is not convinced that having a smaller data transaction limit is the correct answer, too. It is impossible to stop the content from being posted on the internet as well, but what they can do is to prevent people from seeing this content via block explorers and similar ways.
Nguyen has also affirmed that people who put this kind of content on the blockchain can be legally prosecuted as they will leave their digital signature on there and they are admissible in courts of law, so people should think twice before doing it.
No Other Way But To Be Constantly On The Watch
The sad truth is that the BSV community has to be on watch now. If its technology allows for this kind of disgusting act, it is the burden of the community to monitor its network in order to find out what is happening and to censor the illegal content.
Money Button, which was at the eye of the hurricane during the discussion, affirmed that the service can moderate its own content for the issue not to happen again. They have vowed to not let content like this be put on the blockchain again and will increase their efforts to censor this kind of content.
According to the company, if the criminals do not find anyone to write the content on the blockchain for them, they will be prevented from actually doing this again.
The sad reality is that now Bitcoin SV will have to monitor its network constantly in order to prevent issues like this from happening again.
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