RE: Smart Media Tokens Use Cases, Caveats And Limitations - The SMT White Paper Series, Ep. Three
Thank you for this @dragosroua, it is one of the most useful posts about SMT I have read so far.
Those three caveats and limitations you mention are all important and have so far largely been skipped over in most of the posts heralding the arrival of SMTs.
Coming from a community activist background I have been exploring ways to use steemit to establish SteemTowns. These are in essence blockchain powered local community networks.
But I have hit a number of barriers with this. It is a very hard task to fit a community network into steemit. It lacks the tools to do much of what such a network needs (eg what's on calendars, jobs databases, ability to filter out NSFW content for use in schools etc).
With the arrival of SMTs it does look like they might provide the vehicle to implement the SteemTowns idea in a more powerful way.
However these limitations of SMTs might still be an issue.
One particular problem for SteemTowns, and in fact any platform or site using SMTs in most of Europe, will the inability to be able to delete content.
The EU's 'right to be forgotten' legislation I believe forces site owners to remove content if requested. How would that work on the blockchain?
The inability to edit after 7 days could also be a problem.
I would appreciate your thoughts on this.
This is an awesome question! I could be wrong but since you control your site (or SteemTown as you call it) you could always remove content from your site, but not the Steem blockchain which you don't control. This may satisfy the "right to be forgotten" legislation.
Yes that is a possibility I guess. I wonder if it would satisfy the EU law makers?
Thinking about it more - it's the Steem blockchain that's actually storing the content, so I would think that to operate in the EU it would need to abide by the "right to be forgotten" regulations, which it obviously can't since it's immutable. So this could potentially be a legal framework for the EU and other governments with similar laws to ban Steem-based services in their jurisdictions.
That could be a big potential problem for the future of the platform. In theory I think the same argument could be applied to Bitcoin or any blockchain really...
I have been wondering about this since I started on steemit.
I run a big community news network that has been running since 1995. It has over 60,000 pages of content and I quite regularly get right to be forgotten requests. As it is a standard web based system I can comply without a problem.
If I was editor of a steem/blockchain based network I wouldn't be able to comply.
I guess somewhere along the line, and possibly quite soon, a legal case will come up. Not sure how steemit inc will handle that - but I am sure the lawyers will be happy 😊
If there is such a legal requirement, then I think we could have a problem. At the UI level a website can enforce policies for not showing certain data, but that data will always be present in the blockchain, that's the goal of a blockchain after all, to keep data immutably, for ever.
This is the wikpedia about it :
And the full EU details are in this document :
I guess it will take lawyers to pull this apart to see how it will apply, or not, to blockchain based systems.
If the EU legislation does apply I am sure there will be some interesting test cases as blockchain sites like steemit add to their content base.