Forgotten in Cyberspace

  Who are the legitimate policing forces in and for cyberspace? European political and legal tradition has relied much on an idea of the distinctive and sovereign identity of the individual, even in cyberspace.   Thus, modern data protection regulation aims to secure that too, in cyberspace, and now globally too. Protecting European values in cyberspace means also protecting those rights everywhere.   But giving individuals control of their data in cyberspace is more challenging than it might seem, particularly when immutability of the datasets says otherwise. Regulators demand that data be erased, yet immutability revoked that capability altogether. Which one wins? Popular solutions so far have involved techniques where blockchain is used to store only metadata, in other words only references to the data, which avoids the issue altogether.   If no actual data to be erased is stored on blockchain, only references, the need to erase disappears. While this seems to enable one to delete data by discarding and destroying the link between those references and the actual data, references which remain on the blockchain are thought to lose their significance as well.   And they in fact largely do. Even “anonymized” metadata like this will preserve information that can later be analyzed and even de-anonymized. Similar techniques have been used before and mechanisms developed to reconstruct and de-anonymize data that has been purposefully scrambled and its internal relations disassociated for such purposes.   Finally, and most importantly, even if this kind of structure could in practice enable the “right to be forgotten” in the blockchain, it would do that with heavy cost: defaulting back to legacy technologies.   Charlie Shrem is a Bitcoin pioneer, a social economist and digital currency trader. His work in this field is legendary. In 2011, at the dawn of the crypto era, he founded BitInstant, the first and largest Bitcoin company. In 2013, he founded the Bitcoin Foundation and serve as its vice chairman. Since then, Charlie has advised more than a dozen digital currency companies, launched and managed numerous partnerships between crypto and non-crypto companies, and is the go-to guy for some of the world’s wealthiest entrepreneurs. In short, he is the ultimate insider at the epicenter of the crypto universe. Crypto.IQ is a premier advisory firm providing expert research, education and advice in the world of cryptoassets. The company is unique in that it combines the unparalleled expertise of crypto pioneer Charlie Shrem with the unparalleled market knowledge of three Wall Street experts with more than a century of combined financial industry experience. Together, they have managed and traded more than $1 billion in assets. In a world of “instant experts,” who have little knowledge or trading experience, the Crypto.IQ team offers the proven depth, insight and knowledge to help their clients achieve success. Raise your Crypto.IQ…and profit! Crypto.IQ gives you the insider knowledge you need to succeed as a cryptocurrency investor.

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