[tyre]

This will neither bring bitcoin down or change it forever.

Any information contained in those bytes is just that: information. What can you say in 20 bytes that can have permanent, material damage to human beings?

A wonderfully sensationalist title, but really nothing to back it up.

[jerf]

"What can you say in 20 bytes that can have permanent, material damage to human beings?"

The AACS encryption key was 16 bytes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy

In general, private keys are in that range of byte size.

[sneak]

They were, indirectly, drawing attention the non-import of that particular byte sequence - it literally does not matter, and the whole thing was to illustrate that a) you can't censor tiny speech effectively and b) DRM is doomed and the keys will always be reverse-engineered.

Saying something meaningful enough to get someone jailed for possessing a drive with the string on it (the criteria for this to be actually harmful to bitcoin) is nearly impossible in 20 bytes in most parts of the developed world.

The article is sensationalist bullshit.

[jerf]

"Saying something meaningful enough to get someone jailed for possessing a drive with the string on it (the criteria for this to be actually harmful to bitcoin) is nearly impossible in 20 bytes in most parts of the developed world."

In a sensible legal regime, sure. In a legal regime looking for an excuse to shut down BitCoin? Easily done. Technically the AACS key is still illegal. I think the latter rather than the former is more accurately the threat.

But then, if a legal regime is looking to shut down BitCoin they already have plenty of avenues. It already looks an awful lot like money laundering, for instance. So this line of thought is garbage... but only because there's no way any legal system would have to stretch this far to attack BitCoin, because they've got a wide variety of far more plausible attacks. It's not exactly the BitCoin-friendly line of argument you might be hoping for.

[dalke]

"Nothing to back it up"?

You've considered only the single-use nature of the 20 byte attack, without realizing that that can be done over, and over, and over again.

As moxie pointed out elsewhere in these comments, Travis Goodspeed and Dan Kaminksy embedded a eulogy to the Len Sassaman in the blockchain. See http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=BUB3dygQ .

But no need to read the other comments, since the author wrote "Some folks have exploited that feature/flaw to publish Wikileaks cables." Information about that publication is in the immediately previous article: "That publishing capability was put into use a couple of days ago when someone publish 2.5 MB of Wikileaks cables in the bitcoin blockchain. It cost a bit of money (about $500) to accomplish that, but the information that was published is now going to be public forever."

A search finds someone who wrote "The wikileaks data starts at transaction 5c593b7b71063a01f4128c98e36fb407b00a87454e67b39ad5f8820ebc1b2ad5".

Therefore, I find your claim that there is "nothing to back it up" untenable.

[new299]

I really don't understand why people are saying it's 20 bytes, the wikileaks cables are about 2mb, with a 100+ line python program. The latest issue is a long (at least 1000 lines) FAQ containing urls.

I think part of the problem is that people don't want to directly point to the data due to it's nature. But you can easily run strings over the blockchain and see what's there. I did myself and then deleted it and zero'd by free space, it's unfortunately not something I would want on my HD. I moved to a blockchainless client.

[cjg]

It's not limited to 20 bytes. If you can create a 20 byte message why not do that several times to make the message length you want.

Specifically, for the blockchain, a transaction sending bitcoins to multiple addresses would do it.