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Comment by datamonsteryum | Hacker News Reader

[CORRECTION/RETRACTION]: I misunderstood ipfs. You can totally edit your DAG in ipfs (which gives you "delete" ability). So Yes cypherpunks01 is completely right.

The explanation of how you do "deletes" in a DAG still stands.

[Original comment:] ipfs doesn't have delete. It's basically a global immutable data store. Brilliantly well suited for a "permanent web" but not well suited for the kind of communication where people want to edit or delete the stuff they've put out in the past.

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Isn't the purpose of any merkle-dag infrastructure to be an immutable data store? How does hypercore support editing in this way?

If you append to a merkle-dag then yes it's immutable, but you can always do the equivalent of a git rebase -- effectively removing a portion of the tree and then selectively re-applying the parts that you want to keep. That creates a new DAG, one that diverges from the DAG that was shared before. For example, if you accidentally commit a database password into your git repository and push it to github, you can go back, edit the git history to exclude that commit, and force-push the new tree to github. This completely removes the info from your git repository. Of course, if someone has already pulled that old code from github, they already have your password -- you can't change that!

I don't see a problem with the truth of the internet being reflected in ipfs.

Consider the internet to be write only, forget maybe (you are not in control of that). If you accidentally commit a password someplace the correct response is changing that password.

That works for passwords, but not for everything. What happens when someone goes "Oops, didn't mean to drop those nudes into my gallery of vacation photos"? Are they irrevocably published? Or can you unpublish them and hope that nobody noticed while they were up?

IPFS reflects the truth of the public internet (and public speech/media in general): With IPFS, and any other internet technology, you can choose to stop sharing data with others, but you can't force other people to stop sharing copies they already have (except through some means outside the protocol, such as DDoS or the law).

I think a design goal of IPFS is that if you publish your nude photos to your personal IPFS node, it wont be sent to another node unless they explicitly request it by content-address. So you can use it to share sensitive data, and you can always layer encryption on top. [1]

[1] https://github.com/ipfs/faq/issues/47

With archives, bots, etc. you can't really "delete" stuff now and be certain its gone forever.

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