On bitcoin data spam, and evil data

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What happens if somebody puts evil data in the blockchain?  What responses are available?

It is a truly awful situation, and difficult to address.

What happened?

The easiest way to explain what happened here is through analogy. Imagine if someone picked a penny stock on the NYSE and made a sequence of apparently pointless trades. Then they announced that the prices of their stock trades actually encoded links to some “evil” websites. You know, maybe $ 0.01 means “a” and $ 0.02 means “b”, etc. Stock market tickers are public, lots of places archive that data, so now lots of people have “links to evil data”. Except really they don’t. What they have is a list of stock trades. You’d need special software to turn that into some other kind of data.

This is what someone has done with Bitcoin. They sent a series of monetary transactions that did not actually represent real trades, and then announced that with a special program you could turn them back into some text. That text then contains links to, well, I don’t actually know what because I haven’t looked. But let’s assume it’s bad stuff.

What solutions are available?  Software update?

The answer is very complex, with implications that travel to the heart of bitcoin’s value.

Sending bitcoins requires two pieces of data: a bitcoin address, and an amount (number of bitcoins).  There is no “comments field” or anything of that nature.  A bitcoin address is just a random 20-byte piece of data.  Normally those 20 bytes are derived from the RIPEMD160 and SHA256 algorithms, but a valid 20 bytes cannot be distinguished from an invalid 20 bytes.  Therefore, if you are willing to waste money — albeit very small fractions like 0.00000001 bitcoins — by sending that money to invalid bitcoin a…
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On bitcoin data spam, and evil data