# kaal:claim:3782198-030

**Claim.** The GDPR's removal remedy cannot be enforced against a public blockchain: scrubbing private information would require more than half of the network's nodes to change their entire protocol and restart the chain, and would have to be repeated for every violating entry.

**Type.** failure  **Support.** argued

**Holds when.**

- applies to open, uncensorable blockchains such as Bitcoin holding personal data

**Source quote.**

> More than half of the network's nodes would be required to change their entire protocol to scrub the data and restart the blockchain. This would need to happen every time information was found on the blockchain which violated the GDPR.

**From.** Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, *Contemporary Decentralization* (2021), New tools: blockchain protocols, page 30

**Cite as.** Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, Contemporary Decentralization (2021). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3782198

**Verify.** sha256 of source PDF `e7e1378e3eed06cace6534e7792a7307d607d18bc6beb4ac45896476280728e4` at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wulfkaal/Academic-Papers/main/papers/pdf/Calcaterra%20and%20Kaal%20-%202021%20-%20Contemporary%20Decentralization.pdf

**Failure mode.** unenforceable-erasure-rights-on-chain  (family: enforcement-gap)

**Topics.** tokenomics

**Keywords.** gdpr, regulation, immutability, bitcoin, censorship-resistance

**Canonical form.** This markdown file is the canonical hashed representation of the claim. Its sha256 is the content hash used for attestation.