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In terms of an incentive, I would say that the node owner would honor the deletion request if the network pays them to do that. If I'm a node operator I don't

by ahnick 6y ago

In terms of an incentive, I would say that the node owner would honor the deletion request if the network pays them to do that. If I'm a node operator I don't so much care about the particular data I'm hosting, just what the network is paying for me to do. The threat model I'm thinking about is a malicious actor requests an IPFS object that he/she knows holds data that is valuable, but that they can not decrypt. They then hold this object for a period of time till at some point they are able to break into it using improved computing power or exploiting some flaw in the implementation. Now, you raise a good point about Filecoin being an open membership network. In my particular example, the malicious actor could just decide to run an IPFS node and start holding any data that comes to it for future malicious purposes and maybe they start pulling down specific files that they want to target directly. I don't have a solution to this other than to think that having some reputation built into the IPFS node network could help mitigate that risk. You might imagine that nodes with high reputation are trusted and it is harder(requires a lot of time/money) as a node operator to become part of that group. People might decide to only trust the highly reputable nodes with their private data and utilize all nodes for public data.

MichaelBurge 6y ago
What if they claim publicly to delete your data, accept decentralized payments to delete the data, actually delete that data on the node in the sense that nobody can retrieve the data on the public internet using any official protocols, but routinely take filesystem-snapshots of their servers and the owner browses them offline undetectably at their leisure? Then 3 years later all the snapshots end up on a torrent site, after you paid that whole time to "delete data".
- ahnick 6y ago
  Yes, I think that is a risk in the absence of a true "Proof of Deletion". Perhaps though it would be so expensive to maintain a copy of all this data that no one is paying you for that nodes would be incentivized to just perform the actual deletion, since the rewards of keeping the data are unknown and the time horizon for maintaining that data at your own expense is unknown.

by ahnick 6y ago

MichaelBurge 6y ago

What if they claim publicly to delete your data, accept decentralized payments to delete the data, actually delete that data on the node in the sense that nobody can retrieve the data on the public internet using any official protocols, but routinely take filesystem-snapshots of their servers and the owner browses them offline undetectably at their leisure? Then 3 years later all the snapshots end up on a torrent site, after you paid that whole time to "delete data".

ahnick 6y ago
Yes, I think that is a risk in the absence of a true "Proof of Deletion". Perhaps though it would be so expensive to maintain a copy of all this data that no one is paying you for that nodes would be incentivized to just perform the actual deletion, since the rewards of keeping the data are unknown and the time horizon for maintaining that data at your own expense is unknown.