Despite the fact that experts are still debating just how financially viable cryptocurrency, blockchain itself still holds a lot of promise for applications in various fields, from medicine, to the employment sector, and beyond.
However, a lot of country leaders are dead set against the rise of cryptocurrency right now, including India, and this latest piece of news could spell more trouble for the dream of a new-age digital currency.
Researchers from the RWTH Aachen University presented a paper at a conference recently, saying they found hundreds of links to child pornography buried in the Bitcoin blockchain, and perhaps even one image of the same. Their findings could be the death blow to an otherwise promising piece of innovation, and what’s currently a multi-billion dollar industry.
In a blockchain, the individual links in the chain act as ledger entries, logging every crypto exchange ever made, in the same way a bank ledger would. The difference is that here, the “ledger” is on every computer on the blockchain, replicated endlessly for as long as it exists. These links in the chain can also potentially store small notes about these transactions or files.
The researchers studied the approximately 1,6000 such files saved in the Bitcoin blockchain at the time, and they found that percent of them contained either a text or image, with just eight of them containing sexual content. Unfortunately, one of those pieces of sexual content appeared to be a pornographic image of an underage child, while two others contained a total of 274 links to child pornography, 142 of which were on the Dark Web.
“Our analysis shows that certain content, e.g., illegal pornography, can render the mere possession of a blockchain illegal,” the researchers wrote. Possessing child pornography is illegal in 112 countries, and merely being part of the blockchain could technically make you prosecutable.
“Since all blockchain data is downloaded and persistently stored by users, they are liable for any objectionable content added to the blockchain by others. Consequently, it would be illegal to participate in a blockchain-based system as soon as it contains illegal content.”
At this point, it’s impossible to say if Bitcoin and other blockchain-based models can develop a security system o workaround to prevent this. At the same time, as horrible as this reality is, it’s one that’s never been considered or discussed, given how new it is. That also means there are no legal guidelines for how to treat this case, meaning blockchain participants could possibly be the ones facing the brunt of problems in future.
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