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Comment by Aelius | Hacker News Reader

This makes a convincing argument for the general adoption of ipfs as a the backbone of the internet.

As I understand it, nothing can be truly deleted, you only need to know what the hash of the object was and chances are it will still be accessible in cache for quite some time.

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So, literally illegal in Europe, where you have the legal right to be forgotten from the internet? There is a lot to be said for being able to delete data from an internet-connected computer and trust that it is, in fact, deleted. Email definitely falls in that category, but while deletion for email has a fairly obvious value, remote mutability of emails is extremely questionable at best.

IANAL but I don't believe ipfs in of itself runs afoul of "right to be forgotten". Skimming Wikipedia, "the right to be forgotten" only requires search engines to not index things which are "deleted", or more realistically, things which have been unlisted.

Because even in the infrastructure we have today, objects aren't truly "deleted" for quite some time, at least not where CDNs and Google and Facebook and others are involved.

Perhaps a better place to start the discussion about the legality of ipfs would be to ask if bittorrent is illegal in Europe.

After all, if even one seeder is online somewhere in the world, a torrent is accessible and cannot be deleted. Does bittorrent have the potential infringe on someone's right to be forgotten?

ipfs operates in a similar way (peers and seeds).

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