Flutterby™! : Kiddie Porn in the Blockchain

I've been thinking about what the successor to the web might look like, and I'm super excited by the possibilities of distributed filesystems, but I've wondered about the possibilities of denial of service attacks based in inserting illegal content, like child pornography, into such systems: If someone can convince you to browse to a link containing that content, it's then instantiated in your local copy and... issues, even more than ending up with something like that in your browser cache (which can also be done with images that aren't visible in the final web page) follow.

Looks like someone else has been thinking about this too: Child abuse imagery found within bitcoin's blockchain

“Our analysis shows that certain content, eg, illegal pornography, can render the mere possession of a blockchain illegal,” the researchers wrote. “Although court rulings do not yet exist, legislative texts from countries such as Germany, the UK, or the USA suggest that illegal content such as [child abuse imagery] can make the blockchain illegal to possess for all users.”