Public Blockchains ' Dark Side

Photo by Hitesh Choudhary on Unsplash

Unintentional use of the XRP ledger is currently being combated by a community of developers.

The unchangeable existence of Blockchain can solve many problems-a databases in which everyone can read, but nobody can change or erase. When an individual wants to write to the database, servers should decide that the added content is great, i.e. to check whether the recipient has enough money to send the transaction for cryptocurrency transactions.

Everyone can participate by running a server, (there's not a governing party, and everyone can see any transactions, as most popular blockchains, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP, are distributed. Others may opt for the same or similar technology, but choose to close server participation, making it central

The main ingredient to eliminate trust from quality is ungoverned and distributed cryptocurrency blockchains. Everyone challenges the tokens exchanged, the distributed network guarantees that all transactions are legitimate and that everyone can participate by public access. No single party may reverse transactions or restore a previous account status.

But, as we've already seen, public nature has a dark side as well. Bitcoin, where Mashable reports on child pornography to the public blockchain in March 2018.

The attempts to exploit software for reasons other than originally planned are unavoidable. There is also a possibility that graffiti artists could mark their territories in a bank building, but where graffiti can be washed off or painted, history is undeletable in permanent information and could include all the network's database members in crimes by storing illegal materials.

A beta release from code for uploading XRP files to the XRP ledger was announced on the tweet on July 23, enabling users to download any size files to the ripple blockchain and to exist forever, indestructibly and immutably. A page explaining how to finance XRP accounts was followed by the tweet theme

The XRP leader offers a large transaction capacity, but only 10-15 transactions per second are commonly used in current cases. It is however not uncommon that a single image is split into more than 100 transactions, all applied to the network at once, essentially stress-testing the network by circumventing the small transaction size by "screwing out" files in smaller pieces, importing the pieces into individual small payments. However, a transaction fee of up to 12 drops is inexpensive and transactions of just one drop a file of 100 chunks actually cost only 1,300 drops, which is roughly US$ 0,0004. The value of the file is as high as 1 drop.

The service has been activated in just a few days, with more than 1100 files downloaded, totaling almost 100 MB of data in about 111,000 chunks, a total of 1,443,000 drops, 1.443 XRP and roughly US 0.445 US-Deposits, respectively. Even though uploading files is free, the network's participating servers are put additional pressure, excessive loads are treated and the entire history host in general now has unintentional information to save.

XRP community members coordinated under XRP Forensics monitor the logbook to record the network impacts caused by the added pressure, transfers, transaction traces and uploading of accounts, while also applying the artificial intelligence APIs from Google Cloud to search all uploads for explicit content. The material is scanned by proprietary code without the files being stored on the disk, using tools like the Vision API that return both recognizable image features and likelihoods on various parameters such as adult and violent content.

Whereas evidence-of-work blockchains rely upon the entire history of the accounts to validate the present status, the XRP directory uses a Consensus algorithm and stores all accounts on each closing directory. Therefore, the files downloaded to the XRP archive can not be available for all time, as participants of the full history can choose not to host the history.

The XRP ledger is always immune to censoring, but Ripple and non-Ripple developers in the group are speaking about the Open-Source XRPL, for example with the limited trans level. In addition, Ripple and non-ripple developers can use third party intelligence and/or middleware to protect them against unintended content.