icebreaker

Just published some thoughts on attestations including 

- why they are best served offchain
- why casts are perfectly palatable

https://paragraph.xyz/@icebreakerlabs/casts-vs-attestations-which-is-better

Feedback always welcome!

What happens in the event that you or the hubs delete this cast cuz you ran out of storage? Does that mean this cast attestation would be lost?

Identity mixologist

Co-founder at @icebreaker

icbk.me/web3pm.fc

What happens in the event that you or the hubs delete this cast cuz you ran out of storage? Does that mean this cast attestation would be lost? 

https://warpcast.com/web3pm/0xe2e0ea16

Great q! 

You *can* use a blockchain for this, but there are many other tools like ipfs you can use instead

When icebreaker stores an attestation, we attempt to store and host a copy of the underlying data as a pseudo ipfs node.

Does having a pseudo IPFS node mean that data can still be deleted permanently if the user who owns it requests it?

Yes. 

Deletion while persisting a universal identifier is an underappreciated benefit of ipfs. 

If a user requested deletion with us, we would delete our copy of that data and no longer serve it.

This is equivalent behavior to submitting a takedown request to Google to no longer show certain data, even if that data is in the public domain.

One important note is that just as with Google takedowns, we can’t guarantee all instances of that data are deleted, just ours. 

A determined user would need to go submit takedown requests to all aggregators that are hosting copies of the data, and even then there’s no guarantee that the data couldn’t resurface later by another party. 

However this is still better than blockchain where no data can ever be deleted, ever.

In the scenario of public, peer to peer endorsements, IPFS-indexing has an advantage over just hosting in Icebreaker’s DB (or someone else’s) because it protects you from being deplatformed. 

Eg
- icebreaker gets a valid request from a government entity to cease hosting your data
- icebreaker goes out of business or fails
- icebreaker decides to gatekeep access to your data

With decentralized architecture, you can still recover your data and identity. 

This is one of the ways we are architecting icebreaker to be incapable of deplatforming a user wrt their data, even if we wanted to.

What are the specific advantages of using IPFS in this scenario compared to traditional private hosting? Is it primarily about transparency and permissionless access, or are there other key benefits?