Posted: Mar 22, 2018 5:22 pm
minininja wrote:felltoearth wrote:I didn’t read the article and correct me if I’m wrong, but the block chain doesn’t actually contain child pornography, it contains a record of financial transaction. I don’t see how anyone would be held liable for that.
Put another way, how liable would I be for a receipt for illegal activity showing up in a second hand book I have purchased?
No, it's not about financial transactions. Technically financial transactions and cryptocurrencies are only a subset of what blockchain does. It is primarily a record of data. In bitcoin there's a limit to how much non-financial additional data can also be stored, although this might not be the case with other cryptocurrencies which could host images in the blockchain. But bitcoin does include in its data direct links to child abuse images hosted elsewhere, so by using bitcoin you are hosting and distributing those links.
That's not at all accurate. Using bitcoin does not require that you run a node or host anything. Using bitcoin can, and I'd venture to guess for most is, as simple as being aware of a small subset of hashes which happen to be valid within the blockchain.
If you want to claim that those who merely use bitcoin are responsible for what is on the blockchain as a whole elsewhere then that's a whole other mess you are wading into.