POSTER: I Don’t Want That Content! On the Risks of Exploiting Bitcoin’s Blockchain as a Content Store

Roman Matzutt, Oliver Hohlfeld, Martin Henze, Robin Rawiel, Jan Henrik Ziegeldorf, Klaus Wehrle

Bitcoin has revolutionized digital currencies and its underlying blockchain has been successfully applied to other domains. To be verifiable by every participating peer, the blockchain maintains every transaction in a persistent, distributed, and tamper-proof log that every participant needs to replicate locally. While this constitutes the central innovation of blockchain technology and is thus a desired property, it can also be abused in ways that are harmful to the overall system. We show for Bitcoin that blockchains potentially provide multiple ways to store (malicious and illegal) content that, once stored, cannot be removed and is replicated by every participating user. We study the evolution of content storage in Bitcoin’s blockchain, classify the stored content, and highlight implications of allowing the storage of arbitrary data in globally replicated blockchains.