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Comment by mw888 | Hacker News Reader

Any blockchain which universally stores media forever puts itself in the category “economically unfeasible/unsustainable.” People pay for that storage and the large and distinct nature of media makes it easy to single out prune. Worst case scenario I replace that block with illegal media with its original block header and no data.

The cost to sustain an illegal media attack such that consecutive blocks contain such data is unsustainable and far easier to ameliorate than a 51% attack. According to this $76k per gigabyte on Eth. https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/872/what-is-the...

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> Worst case scenario I replace that block with illegal media with its original block header and no data

How do you alter a block without altering the headers of every other block afterwards? Unless you are capable of second pre-image attacks on modern cryptographic hashes that's simply not possible. What you have is a database, not a blockchain.

You can release a hardfork, such that all participants agree to treat the offending block as a special case. No different from the Ethereum DAO fiasco.

> You can release a hardfork, such that all participants agree to treat the offending block as a special case. No different from the Ethereum DAO fiasco.

How do you get everyone to agree to fork each time someone stores or identifies offending material (or a pointer to such) on chain?

At least in the Ethereum DAO case, everyone had a vested interest in switching to the fork.

You would need a regularly scheduled "Hard Fork Thursday" or similar to effectively address the issue, and that's quite unlikely as this introduces new vulnerabilities.

Saying "just hard fork it" is kind of admitting defeat, no?

Yes, personally I would not recommend this approach, just wanted to clarify how such a thing could be achieved.

What I get from this is that all web3 promises are smoke and mirrors. ok your photos arent stored on the blockchain... the blockchain just stores your image URLS.... so then if there is still a traditional repository for content off the blockchain, you now have two points of failure instead of one.

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