Ethereum Swarm - Swarm Beta Event - DREAM: Deleting files on Swarm

next up is a little bit a weird topic i think because um in this space there's a lot of focus of course in making sure that data can be persisted and we are doing all we can um to to do that right like with incentives and and technological solutions yet the next topic is all about deleting data from a decentralized network you would say this is weird um it's coming from the brilliant mind of dany who is sitting in the same bubble as rinke and victor so danny please go ahead and i hope you can explain why and how you would delete things from our network i don't have audio for you for now is it just me or are we lose or don't we have audio yeah i think it's good now okay now we have audio thank you so much so the dream protocol which is not part of the beta release about my wealth find its way into one of the future releases achieves something that many people very much including ourselves believed to be impossible and a contradiction in terms namely deleting information from a network that provides permissionless publishing so how is it not a contradiction well first of all not every information can be deleted but only the kind of information that was marked as such marked deletable during the upload and secondly not anybody gets to delete that information but only those authorized during the upload so if you want to upload something deletable then it will be deletable by those who are authorized to delete it so this is very good for multiple reasons one of which is compliance full compliance with uh with regulations and user expectations so we might mention gdpr here and people's natural worries about their personal data and secondly because some information has a limited uh limited time to live so what what even what that what does it even mean to delete something from a distributed storage does that mean that everybody scrubs it off their hard disks well not really because you know you cannot force people to do such things that's the whole point of of swarm right so what it actually means that well the first thing that it means that outside of the window between it was uploaded and when it was deleted the methods by which you can access them don't work so if you click on a link that points to some deletable information after it was deleted you will not get that piece of information but it's not just that it's more than that it means that unless you have access this information when it was available and paid at least as much as is required to store it someplace else be it your hard drive or reuploading it to swarm again or something like that so if you haven't paid that much then the information cannot be reconstructed from what's on swarm after it has been deleted and that actually happens to be the most that can be achieved in this regard because of course when the information is available anybody can download it and store it but the nice thing that dream protocol achieves again is that unless you go this far the information will not be accessible and for anybody who didn't access the information during the window when it was actually accessible it won't be possible to reconstruct it from any date on swarm at all and the way this is structured is that there only needs to be a number of reliable nodes a small number of reliable nodes that actually follow the protocol and don't make some costly site functions by archiving information that was meant to be deleted then the security guarantees of the dream protocol are actually achieved so that's that's what the dream protocol does and i think that it's kind of a research breakthrough and we will be very happy to include this functionality in one of the upcoming swarm releases it's currently specked out there are still some debates about the tiny details but when they are resolved it will go into implementation so that's it any questions perhaps uh well maybe thank you so much uh uh for this explanation maybe we can um bundle all the questions in the in the ama if that's okay for you um to our audience i want to say that in this zoom call there's um the q and a button somewhere i don't yes it's at the bottom of the screen so you can just click this and ask your questions throughout this event and we will answer them at the end danny thank you so much again for your vision um and i will see you soon in the ama you