Author: steve 2013-04-09 18:56:02
Published on: 2013-04-09T18:56:02+00:00
In an email exchange on the Bitcoin-development mailing list, Caleb James DeLisle shared his thoughts on how anti-virus software might respond to certain streams of bytes being sent across a TCP socket or persisted to disk. While he acknowledged the legality aspect of this issue, he suggested that it was worth considering what AV software might do under these circumstances. Another member of the group, Steve, recommended setting up a private testnet and using the Eicar test virus to experiment with getting it flagged by AV. The discussion then turned to the broader issue of blockchains being used for illegal content. Mike Hearn argued that defining "abuse" in economic terms would exclude legitimate uses, and that fees would not work to prevent abuse as some parties may be willing to pay high costs to upload illegal content. He went on to suggest that the root problem is the assumption that blockchains are a data structure that will live forever and be served by everyone for free, which is unlikely in the long run due to legal issues and the need to host blocks forever. Hearn proposed several solutions, including pruning old blocks, charging for access to older parts of the chain, and changing the protocol to make serving up blocks more bandwidth-intensive over time. The goal would be to discourage the use of blockchains for illegal content. Overall, the discussion covered a range of technical and philosophical issues related to the use of blockchains for storing data.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T14:46:51.259741+00:00