[kragen]

what if you accidentally wrote your private key, photos of your nude boyfriend, or evidence of a crime to your mass storage

[sharkjacobs]

Then you would delete it

> everything would be append-only by default

doesn't mean everything is permanently etched into stone or written on the blockchain, it just means that "by default" everything you write is written to a new block[1], instead of having to free up old blocks to reuse and keep track of which blocks of storage are available

[1]"block" is just meant as a generic unit of storage, I'm not trying to say anything about actual drive blocks and implementation details

[sn0wf1re]

Even if it is etched in stone (or laser blasted into crystal), nothing a chisel and a hammer can't undo. :)

[bitwize]

The blocks with those would be scribbled over and invalidated.

Do you know why ASCII 0x7f is DEL? Paper tape is write-once. To indicate a deleted character, it was conventional to punch holes in all bit positions -- 0x7f on a 7-bit punch.

[kragen]

excellent point