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by qbasic_forever 1556 days ago
It's all fun and games until a judge orders you to remove the content, like a revenge porn photo for example. You'll have plenty of time to think about how best to explain immutability, blockchains, etc. as you're sitting in jail in contempt of court.

The web3 dream of nothing is ever deleted is going to have to hit the brick wall of reality that we as a society agree to follow laws that explicitly allow deleting and removing content. You need a judicial solution to change that, not just a technology one.
2 comments
azangru 1556 days ago
> until a judge orders you to remove the content, like a revenge porn photo for example

Can a judge order you to do something that is not possible? For example, if you were offering an end-to-end encrypted messaging service, can the judge order you to provide a decrypted version of a user's correspondence?

> The web3 dream of nothing is ever deleted is going to have to hit the brick wall of reality that we as a society agree to follow laws that explicitly allow deleting and removing content. You need a judicial solution to change that, not just a technology one.

Yes, I think that's why Balaji Srinivasan is talking about "network states", and "layer 0" (the ideological and legal layer) of cryptocurrencies.

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chrismorgan 1556 days ago
> Can a judge order you to do something that is not possible?

Certainly. Here’s a relevant explanatory comment that I wrote a couple of years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23632398.

Contempt of court is an exceptionally powerful instrument. If the law says you must remove things on request, what were you doing putting stuff in a place that you couldn’t remove them? And if the law says you must provide such-and-such information to the police on presentation of a court order, “I can’t because I designed it so I couldn’t” is not an acceptable defence. So far, these things have been flying under the radar for the most part, but it wouldn’t take much for them to be explicitly banned on the grounds that they make it impossible to comply with law.

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Jcowell 1556 days ago
This makes me think, how would this work with the “right to be forgotten” laws ?
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