he is wrong, my post above shows that its just as easy to extract data from non-contiguous sequences. the "readily viewable by standard software" is my one liner above. it doesn't require specialized software.
Szabo has a degree in computer science and a degree in law. He says:
"illegal content in a contiguous standard format, thus readily viewable by standard software, is more likely to impress lawyers, judges, and jurors, and thus is legally more risky, than data that has been broken up or hidden and thus requires specialized software to reconstruct. Such demos would be part of convincing these legal decision-makers that a defendant node operator had knowledge of the content."
https://x.com/NickSzabo4/status/1972505731095306459
And remember, this issue is not 100% technical and cannot be fully understood using technical arguments only.
Discussion
I guess my argument from authority didn't work
A lot of very complex software can be put into one line
i did not have custom or complex software in this line. everything here is readily available on any linux machine running bitcoin. this is such a weak argument.
Your line is gibberish to a lawyer.
Would an Op_Return extraction be simpler? Yes. Would it require fewer Linux utilities to extract? Yes. Is it easier for less technical person to accomplish? Yes. Case closed.
here is the equivalent op_return one liner
bitcoin-cli getrawtransaction 6ae4de7542bebb0884b08db8265d7567b27673034da179980c632b8d592ffe9b true \
| jq -r '.vout[] | select(.scriptPubKey.type=="nulldata") | .scriptPubKey.asm' \
| sed 's/^OP_RETURN //' \
| xxd -r -p
I don't think its much different.