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Comment by jbaczuk | Hacker News Reader

seems like "blockchain" has nothing to do with it... they could just host the file on a server they do control. "Blockchains" aren't magic.

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Blockchains - that is, the communities that use them - are at least theoretically committed to immutable permanent records of everything that happened. By design, if you tried to "retroactively" edit the contents of the blockchain, you would break the whole thing. So if the blockchain hosters stick to their avowed principles and system design, they can't remove your exploit code without taking down their whole system.

Of course in reality most blockchain folk are grifters who will happily compromise their principles as soon as you credibly threaten their pocketbook - see the Ethereum DAO for the clearest example. Still, it's funny to force them to admit it.

In fact the blockchain cannot be broken because it is a chain. Compare it to git commits. If you would hack away one commit in the middle, the whole system would change. The other commits are comparable to any other transaction (ledger) that happened anywhere. As far as i understood, 'in blockchain' =='carved in stone' .

If people actually follow the rules they claim they do then yes. In practice once you ask them to put their money where their mouth is people make an exception. Again see the Ethereum DAO incident.

It's not magic but it is a radically different pricing model: pay once, host forever.

I see it as a massive bet on storage prices continuing to decrease.

If it becomes a problem consensus can evolve to trim inactive data (say expiring unspent outputs after N blocks in UTXO chains, "move it or lose it" model) or explicit charging for storage per unit of size and time (decay some associated balance accordingly).

I think nocoiners completely miss this aspect, the media too

many devs will always post their applications on blockchains, and simply do system design conducive to that environment, because web 2.0 cloud models do not compete in pricing especially if you have a burst of activity

many devs bring their whole audience over, and the audience is willing to pay to update the state of the application with no overhead cost to the dev, which is also impossible to implement in web 2.0 cloud offerings, aside from just searching and hoping for free tiers

who cares if none of those applications match your use case, just call it the entertainment sector then and you still have value and utility to someone, that self perpetuates

or pay never and host it on the infected website

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