Absolute immutability is kind of a terrible property for a financial system though, cos it completely ignores the fact that mistakes and fraud happen and you need a way to forcefully recover funds other than "lol sucks to be you I guess".

The one actually genuinely useful application for this kind of technology that anyone has come up with is Certificate Transparency, but crypto people don't get excited about it cos it's not possible to make money from it.

[–] anivia@lemmy.ml 17 points 8 months ago (1 children)

You can implement clawback while still having an immutable blockchain. The transaction will always stay on the blockchain, but the funds can be recovered

[–] Pika@sh.itjust.works 17 points 8 months ago

this is how it should be anyway, you do not want any ledger or database to be mutable because it allows for integrity violations and will cause you to lose the ability to trust it. Even non-blockchain styles follow that principle.

[–] uis@lemm.ee 15 points 8 months ago (2 children)

You can revert transactions with immutable storage. For example git can do revert-commits.

[–] OneCardboardBox@lemmy.sdf.org 13 points 8 months ago

Reverts work because users have equal write access to all the data. You can mess things up in the codebase, and even if you die of a heart attack 10m later, my revert is just as valid as your commit.

It's not really the same when every user has "sovereignty" over their address in the ledger. A bad actor has to consent to pushing a revert transaction onto the chain, or they have to consent to using a blockchain system where 3rd-party reversion is possible (which exists on some systems, but also defeats the concept of true sovereignty over your address).

[–] Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

So, would the bitcoin equivalent be sending the BTC back?

[–] HaywardT@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yes. Clawback might be executed by having some entity or system of trust that is able to reverse a transaction by creating and posting the opposite of the faulty transaction. This is not built in to the current BTC.

[–] nothead@lemmy.world 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Its a good concept, but it violates other concepts of the blockchain and would mean implementing a central authority with the power to force a transaction. Try telling a cryptobro to use a coin with a central bank and imagine the reaction you'd get.

At least with the way the regular banking system is set up, you can get a court order to enforce a correction without needing the consent of all parties, which is useful for fraud, theft, and even probate cases when one party is deceased and can no longer consent to a transaction. There are enough problems with our system to write an entire library of books ON TOP OF the library that already exists, but this feature is one of the few benefits.

[–] HaywardT@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 7 months ago

It could be done on a blockchain. It doesn't require a central authority.

It could be escrow-based. It could use majority rule or even Monte Carlo methods.