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Comment by philip1209 | Hacker News Reader

What would happen if they started writing the articles to a blockchain? It would be functionally impossible to remove, right?

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If you start a blockchain made of copyright violation, it's going to be legally about the same as a torrent, and you'll get hit for connecting at all.

What if all servers would hold some random bits and no one would have any whole file (only the clients would be getting whole files)

The talk of holding "random bits" reminds me of the idea behind the Owner-Free File System:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OFFSystem

Basically people would be hosting random-looking blocks of data, but users could be instructed to XOR two carefully chosen blocks together, producing a meaningful file.

Because of the nature of XOR, if Alice sees that Bob is hosting a file F, she could generate and host a file G, such that F XOR G produces a banned file, providing plausible deniability for Bob (as long as he can point to a file H such that F XOR H produces an innocent file).

There's already plenty of legally questionable stuff in Bitcoin's blockchain:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16617136

Thus, it would be better (if it could be afforded --- see some of the other comments on cost estimates) to continue there, or perhaps one of the other altcoins that's already in use for monetary purposes.

It's very incidental, though, and most of it could be purged with mild effort.

The whole point of a blockchain is that it's append-only. Each block has a hash of the previous block. If you wanted to modify a Bitcoin block from a year ago, you'd have to do the same computation as a year worth of all miners.

The blocks are hash trees, and you don't need to store the whole tree. Purging depends on that, not altering the block history.

The durability would depend on how many people cared to host that particular blockchain.

For a popular blockchain like teh bitcoin, it would cost quite a lot to introduce much data.

At 30 satoshi per byte, 5 gigs would be about 50 bitcoins. At $7, that’s only$350k right?

That’s a pretty awesome Kickstarter project.

or you can host it on some offshore/for/ipfs server and pay $100

Good point. But since there’s not much usage yet, they can block ipfs. They can’t block bitcoin.

Until somebody adds CP.

Namecoin

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