Something that always confused me about "compliant blockchains": GDPR gives people a right to be forgotten, and blockchains are famously impossible to forget anything on. Those two ideas look like they cant both be true. This week i finally understood how Dusk squares them.
The naive expectation is that a privacy chain must have some clever delete function, a way to reach back and erase your data when you ask. It doesnt, and it cant, immutability is the whole point of a ledger.
Dusks answer is the opposite of deletion. The trick is that your personal and financial data never goes on-chain in readable form to begin with. Balances, identities, transaction details, they sit encrypted or as private state, with only proofs and selectively-disclosed views exposed. The public ledger holds cryptographic commitments, not your name and your holdings.
So the "right to be forgotten" question mostly dissolves. You cant be asked to erase what was never publicly written. Theres no plaintext personal record sitting there immutably in the first place.
Laid out like that, it flips the usual framing. Most chains try to add privacy on top of a transparent-by-default ledger. Dusk starts private and reveals selectively, which is exactly the shape GDPR-style rules want.
The honest caveat is that "encrypted, not deleted" and "legally erased" arent obviously the same thing to a regulator. Keys, metadata, and off-chain copies still exist somewhere.
Has anyone seen how a regulator actually treats "the data was never public" versus "the data was deleted"? Genuinely curious whether encryption-instead-of-erasure has been tested against a real GDPR request yet, or if its still theory. @Dusk_Foundation
$DUSK #dusk
The naive expectation is that a privacy chain must have some clever delete function, a way to reach back and erase your data when you ask. It doesnt, and it cant, immutability is the whole point of a ledger.
Dusks answer is the opposite of deletion. The trick is that your personal and financial data never goes on-chain in readable form to begin with. Balances, identities, transaction details, they sit encrypted or as private state, with only proofs and selectively-disclosed views exposed. The public ledger holds cryptographic commitments, not your name and your holdings.
So the "right to be forgotten" question mostly dissolves. You cant be asked to erase what was never publicly written. Theres no plaintext personal record sitting there immutably in the first place.
Laid out like that, it flips the usual framing. Most chains try to add privacy on top of a transparent-by-default ledger. Dusk starts private and reveals selectively, which is exactly the shape GDPR-style rules want.
The honest caveat is that "encrypted, not deleted" and "legally erased" arent obviously the same thing to a regulator. Keys, metadata, and off-chain copies still exist somewhere.
Has anyone seen how a regulator actually treats "the data was never public" versus "the data was deleted"? Genuinely curious whether encryption-instead-of-erasure has been tested against a real GDPR request yet, or if its still theory. @Dusk_Foundation
$DUSK #dusk