this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2024
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Asklemmy
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Isn't the point of blockchain that it's immutable? What about people who want to delete their own stuff? Or even mods or admins that have to delete stuff for legal reasons?
That's useful for "real life" data, so to speak, stuff that should be immutable, save for a few occasions, like correcting errors; but my question was geared towards internet content. Taking your example of Wikipedia, if the service suffers from a wave of trolls, as it exists today, it can roll back the changes. With a blockchain? That's significantly harder, especially if useful edits happened in the meantime.
There's also this problem:
Supposing this Wiki doesn't store any of the content, then the endpoints become the targets, which beats the whole purpose of the blockchain resilience/immutability. An endpoint that can't be reached is useless, one that has been compromised is even worse. You can trust the blockchain, but not the endpoint. And if the endpoint is where the "real stuff" is at anyway, why even bother with a blockchain?
Deleting anything from the internet is theorically impossible, it shouldn't a mandatory requirement for anything.
Instead you publish a deletion request that politely asks everyone to pretend it doesn't exist
Whether it's impossible is up for debate. Deleting your data from any social media or google-like platform is pretty much impossible. Deleting your old blogger that hasn't been archived in any manner, perfectly doable.
There's also the blatantly illegal stuff that is removed from the wider net whenever it's found, like child abuse stuff. Imagine that kind of thing being available "forever" in a blockchain.
I meant in the sense that if someone got a copy while it was up, then it's not really gone. Even if the statists try to exterminate all copies, they will probably fail.
After all, even the pirate bay is still reachable in the clearnet. There is stilln a long way to go before they can really stamp out thoughtcrime.