Bans affecting CSAM are very popular, says Szabo.
In addition to being a computer scientist, Nick Szabo is also a lawyer.
Nick Szabo, the pioneer of Bitcoin (BTC) with the creation of the decentralized digital currency Bit Gold, returned to the topic of the legal and “moral” risks posed by embedding arbitrary content in Bitcoin blocks.
In a recent publication on October 22, Szabo, who is also a lawyer graduated from the University of Washington law school, assured that the impossibility of selectively deleting content on blockchains causes more problems.“We have to operate data services where unacceptable content can be selectively removed.”
Arbitrary content on blockchains makes their operation much riskier, both legally and morally, than if they are limited to financial transactions. Operating a node, where unacceptable content cannot be selectively removed without causing broader functional disruption, is also much riskier than operating data services where unacceptable content can be selectively removed without causing broader functional disruption.
Nick Szabo, creator of Bit Gold.
For Nick Szabo, there is a wide variety of moral and legal categories of arbitrary content, each one which receives a different legal and moral treatment by law enforcement.
Child sexual abuse material/communication for sexual purposes (CSAM/CP), other types of obscenity, copyrighted material, censored political content, trade secrets, classified material and many other similar categories are treated extremely differently by morality and the law. What’s more, each of the hundreds of jurisdictions where a blockchain operates has its own wide variations. Some legal prohibitions, such as those affecting CSAM/CP, are widely popular and require rigorous implementation.
Nick Szabo, creator of Bit Gold.
By CSAM/CP, the cryptographer is referring to child sexual abuse content. Being a decentralized network and allowing non-monetary uses (such as embedding data in the form of plain text, images or videos), Bitcoin, like other systems peer-to-peer (P2P), you may be a victim of careless or malicious actors that include legally unacceptable data through arbitrary content in transactions.
Bit Gold Creator Continues Debate Over Arbitrary Data in Bitcoin
Concern about this type of content embedded in Bitcoin blocks, across the field OP_RETURN or by other methods is not new, but it recently resurfaced in a debate between the Bitcoin Core developer community and Bitcoin Knots.
Luke Dashjr, one of the longest contributors to the development of Bitcoin, is the promoter of this narrative according to which almost everything Non-monetary use of Bitcoin is dangerousas reported by CriptoNoticias. To defend against this, the developer emphasizes the need to use filters «anti-spam» on Knots, the second largest node client in Bitcoin.
For Szabo, a government’s response to one type of illegal content “is an extremely poor predictor of its response to another type of content. “The response of one government to one type of content is usually a poor predictor of the response of another government to the same content,” he comments.
Therefore, the more types of arbitrary content there are in Bitcoin, the law would have more offensive vectors against the decentralized networkis deduced from what the academic said.
The creator of Bit Gold, who some speculate is Satoshi Nakamoto, concludes his post in X saying: “Nodes on blockchains that, through means such as escalating fees, byte limits, formatting, etc., discourage arbitrary content, are much less risky to operate than nodes on blockchains that encourage arbitrary content.”