Bitcoin-QT should block blockchain

alanast commented at 5:14 pm on May 13, 2013: none

I have just finished the most frightening and stressful meetings in my life.

To avoid boring you with a long story of tears this is it in short:

Some nasty person– NOT ME– used bitcoin to pay for some very nasty business.

My home was INCORRECTLY displayed as the source of these transactions on blockchain.

Because of this law enforcement believe I was guilty and took me and my computers. In result I have been violated in body and mind.

It was very hard to say them that the data stored in the blockchain was not valid. This is doing to all the discussion about how reliable and tamper proof it is. I was believed only after finding my computer free of any indication.

If my computer is for my interest it would not permit connection to blockchain!!!! Connecting to this treacherous thing does me no benefit!

I know others can connect and false claim my address but they should be stopped too and can be when they make those words public. The problem is making of it public because then ignorant people will see and accuse!

If you fear shutting down the service you should not because it is bad and causes great harm to people. But if you must protect it then make the blocking only active if the software has made transactions then blockchain can stay connected but only via wallets with no transactions which can easily be seen to have no indication.

grue0 commented at 5:22 pm on May 13, 2013: none

you are probably talking about blockchain.info. the site shows the node that relayed transaction to it. this is NOT indicative of who made the transaction or the original broadcaster.

gavinandresen commented at 5:38 pm on May 13, 2013: contributor

Clarifying questions:

When you say “my home was incorrectly displayed… on blockchain” you mean your IP address was identified as the source of the transaction on the blockchain.info website ?
When you say “should block blockchain” you mean the client should prevent connections from the blockchain.info “try to figure out where transactions are from” code?

alanast1 commented at 5:54 pm on May 13, 2013: none

gavinandersen, [1] yes, [2] yes. Thank you for listening. You are the first person to listen in days.

gavinandresen commented at 6:05 pm on May 13, 2013: contributor

@alanast1 : thanks, I understand the issue.

If they speak English, feel free to ask the authorities to contact me if they have questions about how Bitcoin works ( gavin@bitcoinfoundation.org ) or why the information on blockchain.info is unreliable.

laanwj commented at 7:55 pm on May 15, 2013: member

I understand why this could be desirable, but how can we practically “block blockchain.info”? If we hardcode a banned IP they could always just switch to another one.

ghost commented at 3:51 pm on May 16, 2013: none

Bitcoin.org actually links to blockchain.info, so I dount this will happen.

Krellan commented at 9:03 pm on May 29, 2013: contributor

Wow, that’s nasty.

That would make a very good argument to encourage people to make sure their Bitcoin client is shut down when they’re not actively using it, even if it means that it will take longer to sync up when needed next time. This probably isn’t in the best interests of the Bitcoin protocol, since it benefits from large numbers of nodes remaining online, to provide stability and scalability.

Has such a thing happened in court before, if not from Bitcoin, then from another similar peer-to-peer protocol? If something illegal is relayed through you, without your knowledge, and the audit trail ends at you and can’t be traced back further, then, are you legally then responsible for it? If so, that would be a rather chilling effect for many other network services, not just Bitcoin. Are you in the USA? If so, that’s very unfortunate, our legal/political climate is not the most welcoming to users of new/disruptive technologies….

The blockchain.info service is merely a collector of information that’s flowing across the Bitcoin network, and while it doesn’t connect to all nodes, it connects to many of them. Probably the criminal transaction happened at a node that was near to you, but not connected to blockchain.info, and it propagated throughout the Bitcoin network, and your node happened to have the bad luck of being the first node visible to blockchain.info that the transaction passed through, so it looked like it was originated by you. Anybody could gather this information and set up a similar website to blockchain.info, there’s nothing unique to them (although they are very good at what they do), so blocking just this one site wouldn’t do anything to help.

What was the outcome of this, did you get help, did you find a competent lawyer?

qubez commented at 7:04 am on June 10, 2013: none

Bitcoin does have the -connect command line and config file option, where it will only attempt to connect to or allow connections from the specified IP addresses. A “deny” command line option, where one could specify a list of malevolent IP addresses, would fit this need - however you would still need to discover IP addresses not to connect to.

A better solution would be for blockchain.info to display a disclaimer “Attention law enforcement: the information displayed on this webpage likely has no correspondence to an actual Bitcoin user’s identity. Ignoring this warning and using data from this website shows you are out of your depth and may make your agency liable for wrongful prosecution.”

Krellan commented at 6:05 pm on July 30, 2013: contributor

qubez: GREAT idea, I like the wording of that phrase, I hope blockchain.info sees it and can apply it. Have you told them?

Perhaps this might help address this issue. For each incoming transaction that is received for the first time, log the IPv4 address/port (or equivalent for other protocols), along with a timestamp, for that TXID. Keep this log indefinitely. The idea would be to be able to provide an audit trail, upon demand, that leads away from your computer.

Unfortunately, in the USA, peer-to-peer networks, insecure Wi-Fi networks, etc. are usually “busted” hop by hop, and if you fail to provide another hop back in the audit trail, then law enforcement assumes YOU are the end of the line, and prosecutes YOU for whatever crime they are fishing for. This provides motivation for everybody to either not let their services be used by the public (bad), or keep records allowing for an audit trail to deflect the heat away from them (good).

Would this be feasible to add to bitcoind and/or Bitcoin-Qt? Implementation seems reasonable.

ghost commented at 6:07 pm on August 13, 2013: none

I’m a little sceptical of whether this actually happened but regardless I’ve added a warning to blockchain.info transaction pages explaining that the “Relayed by IP” doesn’t necessarily indicate the transaction creator.

Krellan commented at 6:13 pm on August 14, 2013: contributor

Nice, thanks! I looked at some transactions but did not see this warning. Where has it been added?

fanquake commented at 1:29 pm on August 16, 2013: member

@Krellan Next to “Relayed by IP” there’s a question mark. It displays the message on hover.

laanwj commented at 12:36 pm on January 17, 2014: member

This is a problem with wrong information from a third-party site.

I’m sorry that this happened to you, but we cannot realistically solve this as bitcoin devs.

If you don’t want your IP to end up on some stupid service on the net you could use Bitcoin from behind TOR.

laanwj closed this on Jan 17, 2014

o-jasper commented at 1:23 pm on February 19, 2015: none

I’m sorry that this happened to you, but we cannot realistically solve this as bitcoin devs.

This is about having a secure network of peers. It is not Sybil-proof in terms of information that can be harvested. Given that apparently “tar pitting” is a term now, it might not be sybil-proof in terms of nodes not co-operating.

The good news is that no hard fork is needed to change how the network works. You can just make a second one and have a sufficient number of nodes play in both networks.

DrahtBot locked this on Sep 8, 2021

Bitcoin-QT should block blockchain #2653