-- By Hiroyuki Tanaka - 6 May 2022
Jeremy Rubin, a 19-year-old student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology was one of the pioneers for cryptojacking. After Rubin’s “Tidbit” was demolished in 2015 triggered by New Jersey's investigation (Under the order, the parties agreed to the imposition of a $25,000 settlement amount that is suspended and will be automatically vacated within two years as long as Tidbit does not access or attempt to access the computers of persons in New Jersey without obtaining verifiable consent of the viewers), technologies with similar concepts have been continuously arising.
The most famous and infamous cryptojacking service in history must be Coinhive (Coinhive is fundamentally and technically no different from Tidbit or other cryptojacking predecessors other than the coin it mines, a privacy-centric coin called Monero instead of Bitcoin.), as it targeted everything from government websites to even Google and YouTube? users. As a result, multiple security firms identified Coinhive as the top malicious threat to web users. Although Coinhive too is already history because it shut down in March 2019 , history is worth examining as it is though-provoking not only for the restriction on personal rights and privacy regarding cryptojacking technologies we face today, but also for our internet activities in general.
However, Tidbit was merely a “proof of concept” and was never implemented. The purpose of Tidbit was useful and legitimate rather than subject to abuse and misuse, which the State of New Jersey even agreed by admitting that, nothing “evidences an inherently improper or malicious intent or design” by Rubin or Tidbit. Lastly, there was nothing technologically distinguishable between Tidbit and online advertisements as they both operate in a similar manner, and even in those days online advertisements could be found everywhere on internet.
Provided that surreptitious mining produces a large part of cryptocurrencies’ base today, the investigation will have a strong impact on economic activities on internet, and concurrently restrict activities with extremely abstract grounds of “protection”. Further, a protection of rights could be a pretext. In such case, the rationale to protect consumers’ privacy will function as a justification to restrict nation’s rights, with no actual cause. This could literally be applied to any actions of internet.
The problem of allowing state laws to restrict out-of-state residents’ rights, is its potential width of the scope. Different state laws altogether virtually can form an unlimited surveillance system across the nation. This surveillance network can be expanded globally too, with each country imposing a restriction of its own. For example, cryptojacking in Japan is criminalized in general.
Therefore, allowing the States or countries to apply their original rule would be a risk for the whole society, allowing to mitigate privacy for the sake of “protection of rights”, if not surveillance.
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