One thing I was trying to find. Is it possible to completely erase things from history?
Because if not, the first time someone uploads something illegal to your decentralized wikipedia and it gets into the block chain, you are in trouble.
Because if not, the first time someone uploads something illegal to your decentralized wikipedia and it gets into the block chain, you are in trouble.
It could also be possible to broadcast some kind of signed take-down message that could be propagated through all of the nodes. If I remember right, Aether said that the centrally hosted json file was needed for legal compliance though.
[1] https://getaether.net/ [2] https://static.getaether.net/Badlist/Latest/badlist.json
Like lwalton says, this is very difficult to do without centralizing authority, as a rebase is a fork, and so you need the whole community to rebase/fork simultaneously. This is a big deal if all data is in the same place.
One approach is to break these logs apart, e.g. per-user, like Cabal does it. Instead of replicating one giant log, you replicate many small logs. As a user, you can choose which logs you want to store, replicate, and which contribute to your materialized view. Or, you can delegate this work to a moderator you trust, who in turn may subscribe to other moderators or blacklists to inform their moderation.
In this way, there's no centralized authority - everyone is their own authority. Writing the user-facing moderation tools is important work, but is a relatively well-understood problem.
One mitigation I've used in one project is to hash records by hashing hashes of their fields, permitting record fields to be selectively deleted from storage (e.g. by a blacklist) without breaking data structure validation capability.
The whole world seems to see indelibility of data as a problem in this context. Yet immutability is seen as a generally good thing for a lot of other software cases. Further we cannot manipulate past events and there even is something about repeating history when you don’t know it.
So why would we really want to delete past data? From this standpoint wouldn’t deleting data be similar to trying to cover up the past? Sure we might also try to label it “humankind’s childish try to assert itself over the unstoppable arrow of time” but that is just too Freudian to me.
Is there some big idea I’m missing that explains the favoring of the “mutable past” view?
This assumes that data is always true and accurate, which is not always the case. Say Bob was convicted for pedophilia but a couple months after the charge was retracted because it was an error. Now Bob can’t find a job because “the data” says he’s a pedophile, even if he’s not.
why is extrajudicial punishment allowed?
In some cases it is common sense. For instance: a pedophile shouldn't be allowed to be a school teacher.
What if someone posted false claims about you? Would you like recourse in that event?
It is called law. There are lots of laws that govern circumstances under which data must be destroyed, and others that make certain data illegal to possess.
You can argue that they're bad laws, and I'd agree that some of them are. But whatever you think of them, ignore them at your peril.
The ideology is law, most blockchains as is do not comply with law. So the are effectively unusable in practice (generally speaking too)
Someone uploads pictures of a child being violently sexually abused to a blockchain. It is my honest opinion the majority of people would not want to continue distributing those photos. It is certainly the law of many countries that it is illegal to distribute such pictures.
yes, we need to be able to erase stuff from the internet.