Posted: Mar 22, 2018 6:36 pm
purplerat wrote:minininja wrote:
No, not at all. Certainly with the internet anyone can contribute, but content can be deleted, servers can be shut down, and even if someone somewhere decides to keep and host their own copy of some particular bit of information, everyone who uses the internet is not required to host everything that's ever been on it, locally.
In theory that sounds great but you know in reality that's not the way it works. Nothing that gets on the internet is ever truly deleted and while nobody hosts "everything" locally just about everybody connected to the internet is likely hosting something they aren't aware of that may very well be illegal. From that standpoint, the same arguments for criminalizing information applies to both. And it's certainly not like people haven't tried to make the same argument against the internet in general that is now being applied to blockchain.
This is just not correct. Plenty of data on the internet has been permanently deleted and always can be unless individuals take it upon themselves to purposefully keep and/or host their own copies, which if it is illegal data is then their own responsibility. Precisely how do you think people are inadvertently hosting illegal content by accessing the internet? The whole point about blockchain is that it's a fundamentally different technology, with every part of it being permanent and distributed. Actually theoretically you can remove earlier parts of a blockchain but it requires a centralised decision and significantly increases security risks - undermining the purpose of blockchain on its own terms.