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0 pointssamatman4y ago0 comments

That's the point of this sort of (hypothetical?) attack: poor Bob now has a poison envelope on his private key, he has something which roughly constitutes 'ownership' of illegal bits.

Does our legal structure support immediately transferring it to a null wallet as a disclaimer of ownership? Bob doesn't want to be the one to make that case law. Nor does he want to hand over his private key, or clean his wallet out of everything but the evil image and then hand over his private key.

Basically there are no good options, although burning the offending data by sending it to /dev/null should emerge as a valid defense. Will it?

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3 comments · 1 top-level

jakear4y ago· 2 in thread

"I swear officer, the only proof I have of ever being sent those images is this folder filled with infinitely detailed top-down photographs of each one of them lying face-up in my trash can""

samatmanOP4y ago

A tidy summary of the issue, that.

But hey, if it was a Bored Cryptokitty, then Bob can't sell it and no one can buy it anymore, so clearly, he doesn't own it.

The same principle should apply to evil bits, the real kicker being that the whole rigamarole is now written to a shared database whose, er, immutability is part of the product on offer.

Man, the Twenties are gonna be lit.

jakear4y ago

The NFT principle only applies when content consumers value maintaining a chain of ownership to content authors. In cases where a clear chain of provenance is more of a liability than an asset, it's probably more desirable to forge a new copy for resale and shred the original.

I suspect this is perhaps a part of why OpenSea maintains a lens over all wallet content requests... the impact of a mass mailing of evil bits to wallets would be devastating to the platform, perhaps to the entire crypto ecosystem. Any corporation who wants to be seen as legitimate must have the capability to keep evil bits out of users eyes.

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