Author: Mike Hearn 2013-04-09 10:42:12
Published on: 2013-04-09T10:42:12+00:00
The conversation revolves around the abuse of Bitcoin's blockchain for hosting illegal and uncensorable content. The problem with defining "abuse" economically is that legitimate and beneficial uses may be excluded. Peter's patch for uneconomical outputs may be different, but fees would not work as it is hard for regular end users to compete with someone who has wild-eyed dedication to "the cause". The root problem is that people believe that the blockchain is a data structure that will exist forever and will be served by everyone for free and thus is perfect for uncensorable stuff. However, this assumption may not hold in the long run. There are two main issues: legal issues and the need to host blocks forever. Legal issues may not pose much of a threat as most end-users will eventually use SPV clients, and it is unlikely that courts will care about illegal stuff in the blockchain that needs special tools to extract. Additionally, nodes will prune old blocks in the future, and they will only have the utxo database, some undo blocks, and some old blocks for serving. This raises questions about incentives for people to not prune. One possible incentive is money- charging for access to older parts of the chain. While fewer people hosting it means higher charges, the price should converge to the actual cost of providing the service, which should be very cheap. To discourage this kind of abuse, one solution could be changing the protocol so that nodes serve up blocks encrypted under a random key, which can only be obtained by finishing the download. Transactions known to be abusive require downloading the entire block rather than selecting transactions with a filter. This solution slows down and makes accessing older data more bandwidth-intensive.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T14:45:51.780716+00:00