What would happen if someone used Boxes to store a piece of content that is illegal (e.g. child pornography, gov’t/state secrets) on chain? All nodes, which store the data, could be in violation of laws. It may seem crazy, but the law of averages says it will happen eventually either because there are crazy/sick people or because of a deliberate act of sabotage. So, what could be done in that eventuality? Is there a technical solution that preserves decentralization?
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This is an important question. I don’t know what the answer is.
That being said, I think this is not specific to boxes: while boxes make it easier to store large amount of data, there were already solutions to store unlimited amount of data in smart contracts using local storage and multiple accounts.
And before smart contracts, you could always store data in transaction fields. The only difference is that now only archival nodes would be affected.
This is also not specific to Algorand: any blockchain has the same issue unfortunately.
Even if a blockchain only allows payment transaction with no extra fields, you can store data for example by sending 0 Algo to addresses meant to represent the data (addresses can indeed contain a lot of arbitrary data: on Algorand for example you can store 32 bytes of data this way).
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Right, but realistically 32 bytes doesn’t seem like enough space to present a realistic problem. I guess someone could compile multiple pieces of data to create a larger file, but that seems distinct from hosting it in readily usable format. And linking to data is different than possessing the data itself. I wasn’t really expecting an answer so much as putting it out there as something that should be considered in advance.
I know it’s a potential problem for other chains. I hope they are thinking about decentralized solutions too. I just never considered it on Algo until the rollout of Boxes. There are sickos out there and crypto already gets beat up on as being something used by cyber criminals. The last thing the crypto community needs is news stories tying it to things like child porn. That would be horrific.
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Can this help? Although the question is not whether it can be done, but whether it can be done while preserving decentralization
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The problem isn’t related only to boxes. You can store any illegal content use note field of trx ( 1KB ) and reconstruct the complete file.
MBR for boxes mitigate the issue , for a 1MB of storage you need about 426 Algo stake.
However, the problem has no solution and is common to all blockchain technology.
Just look at the history of bitcoin, there are many pointers embedded and made permanent using the blockchain.
pay attention to value . 32KB —> 262Kb enought for storing ‘more things’.
p.s made some correction to more precision