Bitcoin SV's op_return upgrade exploited to store child abuse imagery

A change to the Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision (BSV) protocol has led to child exploitation material being posted to its blockchain, TheNextWeb reports.

nChain’s Bitcoin SV developer, ‘Shadders’, recently came together with developers and miners to lift the op_return limits, enabling a single transaction to hold up to 100KB of arbitrary data. As a result, entire webpages, images, and audio can be stored in one transaction. The upgrade did not require a hard fork as the parameter could be increased with miners simply agreeing on the limit.

The child exploitation content was found to be ‘uploaded’ through a transaction processed by Money Button, a BSV-specific wallet application.

BSV’s immutable nature means that the illegal content will remain hosted by the blockchain, unless developers agree to undergo a hard fork to roll back the unwanted transactions.

Despite the unfortunate situation, nChain CEO, Jimmy Nguyen, asserted that limiting data capacity is not a viable solution. Rather, Nguyen hopes that service providers operating on BSV will take measures to prevent writing to or reading from illegal content.