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by sharkbot 1212 days ago
The article talks about ownership transfer of a url database and the potential for history rewriting. An incentivized blockchain could be part of the solution to ensure history rewrites are not economically possible. I don’t have a protocol sketch, this is just a marginalia comment.

Exercise left for an interested reader, which sounds like isn’t you :)
1 comments
rom-antics 1212 days ago
The article says that such a URL database should never be used in the first place. You don't have to pay anybody to preserve the history of your data, if you just maintain control of your data in the first place. It's just 30 more bytes to store, I think we all can afford the cost.
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sharkbot 1211 days ago
I don’t mean to belabour the point, but I think the nuance is worth exploring.

The key point in my view is “control”. You’ve referred to Uber.com/Xmas-sale as an example where Uber the economic entity is in charge of their own shortening and therefore avoids the problem. However, Uber the company may fall on hard times, sell their real and intellectual property and we’re facing the same issue of a lifetime mismatch between an owner and an URI.

Incentivized blockchains are theoretically singletons and perpetual; the worst case of a history rewrite is economically disincentivized. The lifetime of the URI database exceeds the URI lifetime.

In practice, I agree with you that companies should ensure control over their URIs over their lifetime. The advantages of a blockchain approach are far outweighed by the current downsides.

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rom-antics 1211 days ago
If I understand you, if the URI database outlives the URI itself, the URIs in the database would still be useless, right? If somebody buys uber.com, it does not matter if we preserve "uber.com/xmas-sale", since the uber.com domain can be pointed at a different server. So you need to save the content as well, which means you'd need something like IPFS. I could see the usecase for something like IPFS on a blockchain (assuming IPFS is not working well enough as is; I have no idea)
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JohnFen 1211 days ago
I think it would not be controversial to say that a blockchain would not address most of the problems IPFS currently has.

Just to avoid misunderstanding -- IPFS right now does work pretty well, but there is plenty of room for improvement.

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lazyasciiart 1211 days ago
The guardian did maintain control of their data.
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