<story><title>An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]</title><url>https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ddalex</author><text>So the obvious bit here is that an adversarial actor can poison the blockchain with bits that make downloading, storing and processing the blockchain a highly illegal act.&lt;p&gt;This may have a chilling effect on participating in the network, thus reducing the number of nodes, and undermining the trust on the blockchain and in the coin because the reduced requirement of computing power needed to mutate the blockchain.&lt;p&gt;Accordingly a determined actor with enough resources (e.g. a nation-state) can render the bitcoin value-less and use-less at will....</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jasode</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt;an adversarial actor can poison the blockchain with bits that make downloading, storing and processing the blockchain a highly illegal act.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Exactly.  I brought up the same scenario recently.[1]&lt;p&gt;The top 2 replies to my comment was basically, &lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;unless you&amp;#x27;re looking for illegal data, it&amp;#x27;s not a problem.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;That head-in-the-sand ignorance completely misses the point.  It&amp;#x27;s not about how _you_ specifically ignore illegal data and therefore, you have absolution of guilt.  It&amp;#x27;s about the &lt;i&gt;whole world&amp;#x27;s response&lt;/i&gt; to bad data in the blockchain.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=14434786&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=14434786&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>An Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin [pdf]</title><url>https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ddalex</author><text>So the obvious bit here is that an adversarial actor can poison the blockchain with bits that make downloading, storing and processing the blockchain a highly illegal act.&lt;p&gt;This may have a chilling effect on participating in the network, thus reducing the number of nodes, and undermining the trust on the blockchain and in the coin because the reduced requirement of computing power needed to mutate the blockchain.&lt;p&gt;Accordingly a determined actor with enough resources (e.g. a nation-state) can render the bitcoin value-less and use-less at will....</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>phkahler</author><text>In addition to illegal content, one could just put a huge amount of data in there to accelerate what seems to be a built in problem of ever increasing storage requirements.</text></comment>