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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Why use blockchain? Doesn't that actually give you less control?

Isn't the point of a blockchain to keep a ledger of the changes? So how can you delete anything without rebuilding the entire chain? Being decentralized in this case just means that now everyone has my data. Sure, it is encrypted, but are we just going to say what is secure today will be secure tomorrow?

My understanding of blockchain is that it is meant to be tamper proof. Which is nice for things like tracking votes or ensuring the integrity of things, but with my personal data I WANT to have the power to tamper with it. These two ideas seem to be at odds.

If I'm misunderstanding, maybe somebody can educate me.

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I had the same thoughts. I'm really getting sick of seeing applications move to the blockchain that have absolutely no business being there. Sure, a ledger makes sense...you never want to remove or change the records.

The blockchain is a really terrible medium for a social network. Maybe some kind of hybrid where the blockchain entries point/link to a centralized (or federated) location, but, then, why not just build your own protocol that doesn't use the blockchain? Just build it over Matrix or something.

What does the blockchain provide, other than a buzzword?

> Maybe some kind of hybrid where the blockchain entries point/link to a centralized (or federated) location...

Well what makes me uncomfortable about this type of data being decentralized is that I want to guarantee a delete or edit. To do that on a decentralized network you need to have a way to guarantee that those edits propagate to machines that you do not control. Is there a way to ensure this?

You can’t guarsntee that with any service. Even if you trust the website to delete it, it can still be cached elsewhere.

I'm not saying that the data can't exists anywhere. You can't prevent a state actor from caching the entire internet or a stalker from saving all your content. BUT you can prevent someone who has not done that already. Which is more common.

But for places like Reddit and Hackernews, it might help prevent content from being censored

On the other hand, it might also make it impossible to moderate the content.

the voting system could address that...

Moderation is not only about voting. The titles of submissions are regularly edited, for example to add year numbers to add context when an article was published.

Of course such edits could be stored in new blocks with the information to replace the title of previous blocks. However, it would not be possible to delete any content.

So you answered your own question... just don't look at the blocks that are marked as "outdated/spam/etc" if you don't want to (but history would still be preserved)

I did not ask any question, I stated a fact. But yes, history will be preserved. However, the point of moderation is also to delete inappropriate content, not only hide it.

Blockchain makes perfect sense as a PKI and for URIs. You don't actually hold state there, just public keys and the location of the actual data.

You don't have to store the data on the blockchain, you can store a pointer, to a storage solution like IPFS, and you have the control of what to show and to whom.

you don't use the blockchain in blockstack to store data, only to create an identity. data is still stored the old fashioned way. the difference is, when there is decentralized identity, it can be tied for example, to your own encrypted data storage. Not sure I am explaining this right, but that's my understanding

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