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Comment by rocgf | Hacker News Reader

Apologies, but this is a very weak an unsubstantiated article, despite agreeing with its premise full heartedly.

> Third, immutability has its downsides. Blocks in the blockchain are for all intents and purposes completely fixed. This means that a transaction that happened erroneously or illegally can never be changed. Or bad data can never be changed. Imagine if you move house and the gas company says: “There is literally no way to change your address in our database.”

I mean... does the author actually believe this is some unsolved problem in Blockchains?

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Obviously you can create a blockchain that allows edits. Git is a crypto tree technology and it allows rebases.

But the whole point of Bitcoin is that no one should have the authority to reverse transactions or print new coins. And all of Web3/Eth/NFT crypto shares the idea that this technology is useful because it removes the need for trusting a central authority (you trust the code and the distributed network instead)

The idea is that you have the coins and NFTs in your own wallet and no one can take those away from you. So if you are going to add a layer that allows transactions to be immutable you are literally describing a bank or a credit card and there is no need for crypto.

I think this is a mischaracterization of what immutability is.

Immutability means you can’t change history not that you can’t update state. If my utility company needs my new home address and they use a blockchain for some reason (maybe part of a near-realtime electricity payment system), I can always sign a transaction to associate my blockchain address with my new home address. Perhaps the electricity equipment itself can sign my signature to ensure that I am physically located with it and have authority to change who it’s representing.

If you have your keys then yes, you can sign a new transaction.

But what happens if you lost your keys and no central authority has the ability to change your address?

And perhaps worse, what happens if someone steals/copies your private key (say your paper backup) and signs a change of address in your name? Can you convince authorities that you didn't actually make the change?

Maybe if it is a physical address. After all, you presumably live there. But what if it's just some payment contract? As far as they care you yourself signed it, and they have the proof. If you can get them to cancel the contract, what was the point of using blockchain anyway?

There is a central authority though, the people who write and maintain the code and make decisions regarding the protocol. How are they accountable?

My opinion is that web3 has greater promise with distributed content - IPFS, the DAT protocol and the Hyper protocols will allow individuals to publish content without the restrictions imposed by infrastructure providers.

I keep hearing this, but this is not a problem for the vast majority of people in the world. And IPFS is not a silver bullet for it anyway, because of the learning curve required to roll your own publishing stack. You can already host your own decentralized Mastodon instance without any blockchain.

Why is it that the numerous famous people that have gotten kicked off Facebook and Twitter never set up a blog or Mastodon instance on their own domain or use a platforms not controlled by American companies? It's because they know that the big platforms is where the people are, and trying to rebuild it all over again is not a waste of time and resources.

If that's all it does then it's a massive success.

IPFS has existed for years without any crypto involvement

Who says crypto has to be involved for it to be web3. Isn't being distributed (versus centralized) the defining characteristic?

The VC vision of Web3 is what is saturating the airwaves, and that absolutely has crypto front and center. Accessing anything considered 'Web3' currently requires a crypto wallet login, unless you're viewing a clearweb mirror version.

Who says we have to listen to the VCs?

Everyone who describes what web3 even is. If it's just decentralized, then web1 was web3.

But the infrastructure must be <somewhere>, right?

Of course, but the useful property is that it could be anywhere.

But over long enough time it _must_ be somewhere where somebody can provide Computational power and evergrowing storage capacity, right?

So.. not anywhere.

Or can the data be available in a highly fragmented fashion _and_ still be useful? I just can't imagine any content system that does not end up being centralized or highly inconvenient.

If someone cares about a piece of content's availability on IPFS, they can host it and anyone in the network can pull it from them without having to know a priori that they provide the content. That's what I mean by "anywhere". Anyone can provide any content they want, from anywhere, on whatever infrastructure they want, as long as there's a communication channel open with the rest of the network.

If you care about high availability of a piece of content, you will dedicate infrastructure to hosting it on IPFS, just like you would on the Internet.

Is there any need for the Blockchain for that? Like... Setup a server and host the content. I can't imagine it being simpler than that.

Why would I engage in the dance of crypto just to host some content no one will read anyway?

What's IPFS?

IPFS doesn't use a blockchain nor crypto. Conceptually the Internet is a set of protocols that together map (data-identifier, provider) -> bytes (e.g. GET https://<provider>/<data-identifier>). Similarly IPFS is a set of protocols that map (data-identifier) -> bytes.

Immutability is the natural state of the past. In the real world, if I give someone money erroneously, the erroneous transfer is not "undone" but rather a new transfer that has the reverse effect of the original transfer is performed. Double-entry bookkeeping doesn't allow for penciling-in corrections. In git this is a revert commit.

Can I ask how this has been solved? I see a number of companies in the HR domain offering "blockchain-based" solutions. However, it seems to be that the immutable nature of blockchain is incompatible with data protection regulation's right to be forgotten.

I'm a crypto novice. My impression is that the author is correct (though the metaphor with the gas company is terrible) - there is no way to reverse a bad transaction.

Is this not an unsolved problem in blockchain?

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