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Comment by yinyinwu | Hacker News Reader

Thanks! DIRT is a fundamentally different approach because it removes the middleman and there is no central moderator. Our goal is to move the trust from a central party to a system of rules that anyone can participate in.

I think verified identity could be a registry on DIRT. Adding reputation on top of voting is something we're exploring.

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I don't understand your answer. Can you explain more clearly what the process would be for removing personal info?

I can't see any obvious place to download this dirt protocol so I can check (the website seems to be 100% marketing, 0% documentation), but based on a combination of pattern recognition and the evasiveness of the above answer, I would wager the answer is "there is no process, we didn't think about data deletion".

Yeah sounded to me like: "It's a feature!"

You’re being generous... this reeks more of scam than carelessness. Either way, it’s going to never actually be delivered, not be GDPR complient, and based on the answers to questions raised here, full of obvious holes. If it isn’t just a scam, it smells like someone went from “here’s a neat idea I’ve spent a whole ten minutes on,” to fundraising without a beat in between.

No resistance to censorship.

No resistance to conflicting information.

More money = more “truth” with no recourse, because removing info costs.

Incorrect info loses you money, but there is no functional systemic way to determine correct/incorrect.

Waaaaay too much marketing and nothing else extant.

For most of the planet GDPR is irrelevant. I personally will never give it any thought when building something.

Failing to give thought to something doesn’t make it go away, but of course it’s your right not to think. As long as you understand that ideology and opinion aside, it can greatly impact your ability to do business in Europe, then you go be you.

Most companies don't do business in Europe.

As defined under GDPR? I’d love citations for that claim.

Most companies don't do business in Europe.

That's an interesting argument.

But unfortunately, it was beaten out by 2%.

https://www.inc.com/anne-gherini/fifty-two-percent-of-us-bus...

Hi there - We are auditing our smart contracts prior to launch and plan to open source them. If you are interested in trying out the protocol on launch, send us a note.

Per GDPR specifically, I am learning about the regulations and my understanding is that the right to be forgotten focuses on personal information. Personal information is not a great fit for DIRT registries because it is not publicly verifiable. The concept of voting to determine correctness works best if that data is public and observable.

By design, a public blockchain is an immutable record maintained by a decentralized network where no central authority has the power to go back and remove something from the record. This makes the blockchain an exciting technology for resisting censorship, but it also means that if someone adds your personal data to the blockchain, your options for removing it are very limited. You would need to shut down all nodes in the network or convince all nodes in the network to agree to a hard fork. In the latter case, nodes that don't join the fork would continue to have the private data.

That's true for unencrypted information stored directly on the blockchain. For applications where you need the ability to delete data and don't need strong censorship resistance, one solution is to store private data off-chain and only store the location and hash of the data in the blockchain. This article discusses that idea in detail:

https://medium.com/wearetheledger/the-blockchain-gdpr-parado...

I think you misunderstand the point. The idea was that the data would not be on dirt. Not in a verified registry on dirt.

How would I remove my personal data, or any proprietary data, if someone uploaded that to DIRT?

From the previous comment of OP, you can't.

> if someone adds your personal data to the blockchain, your options for removing it are very limited.

source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17511150

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