Bitcoin SV grabs the headlines every once in a while. Led by the ever-so-controversial Craig Wright, the project is barely three months old, but it has already made more news than many other projects.
This time, it was for the worst possible reason. A user of the Bitcoin SV blockchain embedded a child abuse image. The image was discovered on Bitcoinfiles.org, a website that enables its users to view documents on blockchains. The site was responsible enough to take down the image hurriedly before it could spread to more users. However, the damage had already been done.
The user who uploaded the image took advantage of a recent increase in the data limit that one can upload to Bitcoin SV’s blockchain. He used Money Button’s service to upload the obscene image. Money Button is a digital currency payments service catering to mobile applications and websites. It’s partly funded by nChain, the company behind Bitcoin SV.
Shortly after the image surfaced, Bitcoinfiles.org and Money Button worked together to take down the image. And it doesn’t end there, Ryan Charles, the founder of Money Button told BBC. According to him, criminals seem unaware about just how easy it is to track a blockchain user. Charles pledged to assist in tracking down the criminal for prosecution. Already, Money Button has shared the information about the uploader to the authorities.
An Enemy Attack or Just a Common Criminal
Eric Ertsu, the founder of Cryptograffiti believes that tracking down the criminal will not be too difficult. Cryptograffiti is a site that lets its users read messages embedded on blockchain networks. He stated:
As for law enforcement, they have to do the good old detective work in hope of tracking down the person who uploaded the illegal content on the blockchain. Since everything you do on the blockchain is immutable, tracking down criminals is not too difficult.
As the authorities strived to track down the person who uploaded the image, another debate was taking center stage. Was this the work of Bitcoin SV’s enemies or was he just a common everyday criminal? Not surprisingly, many in the Bitcoin SV community believe this is the work of an enemy faction.
One of these is Craig Wright, the equally loved and loathed Bitcoin SV leader. Wright took to Twitter to call out The Next Web, the first media outlet that reported on the issue. The chief scientist at nChain demanded that the outlet take down the article which he said had an accusing tone. He further threatened legal action on the outlet. This later became the subject of a heated online exchange between him and the outlet’s chief editor.
Jimmy Nguyen, the CEO of nChain took a progressive stance, branding the incident as random. BSV’s blockchain is like any other and it allows any user to post anything. This means that every once in a while, a criminal will post something obscene or illegal. It’s the price we have to pay for the freedom that decentralized networks give us.
He stated:
The same is true for the internet and is true for the Bitcoin Core (BTC), Bitcoin Cash (BCH-ABC), Ethereum and other cryptocurrency networks – on which illegal content likely already lives
Image(s): Shutterstock.com
1 Comment
Bitcoin SV isn’t exactly new project, well the coin looks like a split off BCH but the people behind it is not new at all. NChain has been around a long time, Craig S Wright has been involved with Bitcoin as early as 2008. He’s also been with BTC when he resurfaced in 2014. He might sound mean but if you look closely he knew more about Bitcoin than any one on this planet. I could understand why he act that way. It is because he cared deeply about Bitcoin, not just some guy trying to tinker and experiment. He cared about seeing it through the original design and he understood how everything works. And, when you constantly having to deal with stupid, the people who try to modify Bitcoin thinking they know what they are doing. You get frustrated to the point, you just don’t care anymore.
So he basically says screw it, I don’t have time to deal with stupid, I’ll just patent everything. The guy is working on some 1000+ patents all related to Blockchain and Bitcoin use cases. Now for us average folks, it might seem overwhelming at first, but Bitcoin is actually rather simple economic system if one simply reads the white paper. Maybe you won’t understand the graphics, but the simple thing like section 6 on incentives. It is clear that coin reward was a method to distribute the coins over time, it halves to give the network time to grow and transition to user fees before the coin reward runs out. Anybody with an average IQ can understand that miners can’t hope to live off coin reward forever. Each time it halves, their revenue is cut in half, there is no stable business. The original design was clear that Bitcoin can handle much more than Visa can process with the technology available at that time in 2009.
Satoshi always said Bitcoin has no limit. So now, we have core people that says Bitcoin can’t scale and that we’re going to off load all transactions to side chain lightning network. Don’t you see something wrong here? Core is rejecting Satoshi. And what’s worst? Off loading transactions to side chain, Bitcoin no longer witness them. You don’t have an immutable ledger anymore, no more chain of digital signatures of every transactions that ever happened.