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Comment by ahnick | Hacker News Reader

The ciphertext is irrelevant now, today. That might not always be the case if computing power improves sufficiently to be able to breakthrough that encryption or a flaw in the encryption algorithm (or default parameters being used in a particular implementation) is discovered. At that point, it would be nice to know that even the ciphertext was not exposed.

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If your data is so important that it needs to be protected from future theoretical attacks.... what the heck are you doing uploading it to a globally distributed and decentralized platform?!

Said another way: you are trying to fit a centralized-shaped peg into a decentralized-shaped hole... wrong tool for the job.

If your use case does involve this situation somehow (?) then the only real solution is to encrypt it, as others in this thread have pointed out. There is simply no other option in an open-membership P2P network... otherwise the RIAA and MPAA would have long ago crushed BitTorrent.

I'm not trying to fit any peg into any hole. Filecoin is the one that advertises the network is for private data. It's hard to quantify the risk from future theoretical attacks and anyone that is storing private data on Filecoin (or IPFS) needs to weigh their own risk tolerance.

Other networks have implemented mechanisms for the network nodes to delete files as detailed elsewhere in this thread and I think it is entirely reasonable to say there is more that could be done at the network level to help mitigate exposure. Dealing in absolutes is a dangerous proposition.

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