Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigmattystyles | Hacker News Reader

One thing I don't get, maybe someone can shed some light; what happens if some trademarked content is added to the blockchain metadata or on something like arweave. If a DMCA comes in - from my reading, blockchains or ipfs stores won't take the item down, but will make it so the address the item is stored at returns nothing. So, it's the equivalent of some entity controlling the DNS? Sure, the item at the address is immutable, but you might not be able to get it. If that's accurate it's 'mostly' immutable, which is not immutable. Am I way off?

View on HN

So the way IPFS works is that the URLs are hashes of the content. If providers are pressed by DMCA they can stop resolving the content but as long as one person resolves the content it should be theoretically accessible. Potentially IPFS relays could choose not to relay this but that's ultimately a weakness of the client not polling multiple relays more than it is the network failing to be resilient.

So IPFS does allow DMCA and the like to exist and function but as long as a certain margin refuse to comply, the network continues to function as expected ignoring the actions of centralised organisations.

I think you're pretty off, yes. Censorship-resistance is one of the core selling points of Ethereum. :)

> but will make it so the address the item is stored at returns nothing

There's no way for the blockchain to do that. The only way this is possible on ethereum is if the smart contract includes a self-destruct function, and the owner of the smart contract decides to call it (either because their private keys were compromised, or because they were coerced into doing so IRL). Otherwise, it's technically impossible to do without taking down the entire network or breaking encryption.

I'm less familiar with IPFS so can't really speak much to that -- but from what little I understand, censorship-resistance is also a major selling point there.

> So, it's the equivalent of some entity controlling the DNS?

There is the ENS, but even then, nobody can take an ENS domain down except for the owner of that domain. Not even the creator of the ENS smart contract, unless they specifically included upgrade functionality into the contract, because smart contracts are immutable.

> Sure, the item at the address is immutable, but you might not be able to get it.

As long as you have access to a single Ethereum node, or access to a service that has access to an Ethereum node, you will be able to get at it. It's hard to imagine you not getting at any Ethereum nodes unless a Great Firewall of China situation exists, and even China doesn't care to ban most proxies.

It's not always about censorship resistance. What if someone uploads child pornography on IPFS? Do we all just go "ah well, it's immutable" and live with it?

Well yes, you either play whack-a-mole with every single IPFS server, or you live with it, because you have no choice.

Like I've said elsewhere, this is "for better or for worse," depending on your political sensibilities. Again, I think Tor is a good example here. Lots of CP on Tor, or so I hear. But also persecuted journalists and whistleblowers, and safer drugs than you'd find on the streets. You can't realistically say "I want X to be outside the reach of tyrannical governments, but not Y." It's an all-or-nothing deal. By its very nature, these sorts of libertarian technologies will attract all the illegal parts of society -- for better or for worse.

So then the ceiling of adoption for this entire ecosystem is Tor or BitTorrent at best. Far cry from the "next internet" it is being touted as.

That's a strong claim. Depends a lot on what the regulatory landscape is going to look like in the future. I'm guessing you're no more a Congress insider than I am.

Having used both defi and traditional financial infrastructure, defi definitely feels a lot, lot more frictionless to me, at least while acting within the Ethereum ecosystem. Time will tell, but I find it hard to believe such frictionlessness won't eventually force its way into the world.

Why would that be a good comparison? If Tor offered comparable services to crypto then we wouldn't be talking about crypto as something different and more advanced than Tor, which it fundamentally is.

IPFS has ways of dealing with that. E.g. your node can backlist hashes.

Yes.

Blockchain nodes are just servers like http servers or ftp servers and so DMCA notices and other legal measures can be taken against the operators of each server. Whether or not such measures would be successful is debatable, but there's nothing magical about a blockchain in this respect. It's just a set of servers replicating state between each other and (potentially) serving that state up to clients.

No actual blockchain will be able to (even in theory) take down DMCA'd data. There is no mechanism whatsoever for complying with such requests, anymore than there's a mechanism for reversing transactions associated with activity a government deems illegal.

Individuals running IPFS gateways or nodes may be directly targeted and asked to take down data, but there's no mechanism for "the network as a whole" to remove data. It's exactly the same as bittorrent. So long as one individual in some hard-to-reach jurisdiction continues hosting the data, nothing can be done.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com