How do you know that data which has not been accessed for 20 years is no longer needed? It could be a will in testament, which has been dormant until needed?
Moreover, what data stored 20 years ago is expensive to store today? 20 years ago the average desktop PC hard disk was 2gb. My phone has double that in RAM and 75 times that in storage… and it fits in my pocket!
Well most of the data that is not accessed for 20 years will be useless. But I don’t think this delete function is necessary as well
I think it may be better than current model in some cases.
I also think wasting precious development time on this right now wouldnt be a smart thing to do. Divisiblity of safecoin is much more concerning topic. But even that can wait until launch
Probably just like lite coin come after bitcoin, some network with these kind of ideas, configurations will come to existence
Edit:fixed a double negative error
I doubt this as the cure is worse than the perceived problem. As @Traktion says the space/bandwidth required to look after data that is 20 years old is miniscule to the new data being held. 20 years is about 10000 times less storage device required.
And the industry is calling the next years increases in SDD unit sizes a quantum leap in size. This maybe the last year of the hard drive size increasing 10 times every 5 years and could be as much as 10 times every 2 years.
So the need to delete data will be troublesome both in coding and requirement. Why delete old immutable data when the cost to keep is less than the costs (coding & attack surface).
Oh and bandwidth increases are faster than what drive size has been.
And what a lot of people forget is that total number of drives produced each year is also increasing. Also the power to storage is massively decreasing too.
This has been the history of computing for more than 4 decades and no indication of decreasing for decades to come. Both research and industry have indicated that they will be increasing their desire for storage and bandwidth for their foreseeable future and even for decades. Personal need also is forecast to increase at exponential rates. Both google and facebook are gearing up for this increase.
The interesting thing when talking of storage and bandwidth is that not only is the unit sizing increasing at these massive rates but also the quantity of units rapidly increasing. This has a multiplying effect that far outstrips the unit size increase (10x/5yr for HD, and double/yr bandwidth)
It would require a disaster of global proportions to see this change and at that time no storage including SAFE would survive well.
Let’s say I make 1 tb of bad Facebook post today than 20 years passes an average person has 10000 tb hard disk and my 1 tb of useless data doesn’t matter as much. But it still matters, as it’s useless nobody will check it and It wastes some part of the internet. But is cleaning this 1tb data will be worth it to network keeping timers on all data? Probably not.
Is it worth developing it right now? Hell no
But wasted space is wasted space if there was a solution to get rid of it without sacrificing more, it would be worth considering. it doesn’t matter how fast drives get bigger
As an another probably better example we can give a mining another safe coin chance to people that delete their data. This way people may sometimes say, hey this is useless maybe I get 0.01 safecoin (edit:better idea just give them %50 puts you delete 1 tb you get 500gb put) by deleting this… Thus cleaning useless data.
Numbers are completely arbitrary but you get my point
… Do you people really go through old files on your computer and delete unused documents/pictures from your hard drive?!
… I keep copies of everything and just keep backing up redundantly because disk space is a none issue…
I do that quite often actually, not the pictures but documents games and videos I check once a month
How large and how filled is your disk?
(and you are the first person I know of that does that… And can you tell me what percentage goes to games vs documents…? )
I have 256 GB ssd and 3tb hard drive
I generally prefer to download my movies and shows and also have quite a large game collection (approx 1tb)
I regularly delete shows that I think I will not watch again and games I think I will not play again
Didn’t feel the need to buy another hard drive yet
My dısk is nearly always at %90
Okay - you do realize that movies /games /shows are something that might be needed by more people than only you - so data deduplication would reduce the amount of storage used for that on your disk by the multiplier 1/[number of other people playing the same game]
So… You are the blockchain way to do it… 
Yes and in fact there is on the back burner a thought of being able to safely delete your files. This has to include who else has use of those immutable chunks. For instance they uploaded the same file or you gave someone a copy of the datamap.
Its not straight forward and the “refund” is also not straight forward.
The most difficult thing to solve is where you share your datamap to others. The network cannot and does know this and deleting a file may rob a person who paid another for creating the file you now delete.
Technically no a movie can be formatted to very different standart h264 h265 Blu Ray
And each one of them would be stored again. Also safe network isn’t a storage device you need to think things like
there will probably lot more wasted space in silly videos on sites like Facebook alternative that nobody would care if they were gone after 1 day.
Spammed YouTube videos
Sites with lots of gifs
Also I think it’s normal to think that deleting unaccessed files is good for the safe network so it should be rewarded
Well this is a very valid point and totally makes my idea fail. So I changed my mind and decided that approach wasn’t good
But even though it isn’t mandatory function. Deleting files (and being rewarded for doing so) would be a positive thing for network that is worth thinking.
And we the community that has nothing better to do to help safe network might as well brainstorm about it.
You ignored the games - and 100 standards with only 10000 people wanting to see them still is 100 times smaller… In average…
But I see that you like to discuss and just think of deleting old data as ‘the right way to do it’ so I’m out of this discussion again 
Obviously, but what joe blow is going to go to that trouble. They were given a USB with the movie and they upload it.
So a movie might be in 5 different formats but 100 copies of some formats were uploaded.
correct. but also there is likely to be only one copy on safe, yet 10,000 people uploaded it and some may want it 10 years from now, since it was their cat in the vid and each family member wants it 10 years from now. The 9995 other people who uploaded it don’t care.
The point is just because some can be deleted without issue, you cannot assume that for all or even most. deleting files is not straight forward.
I don’t have a better idea right now(and all that I came up with was inferior to current approach) and I am not the kind of person who says it should be like that without proposing a solution
So I shall accept my defeat and dissappear, I hope you have nice day sir it was very informative
If I have an another idea I will be back
If you search the forum then you should find a few discussions on this and the complexities involved. So don’t think you are defeated, just having an idea others before you have had and already discussed. Its an ongoing idea that the team might find a solution to it.
Exactly, I think the biggest issue we face now that is sorta new is massive unique data. So uploads ofm security cameras, home movies in raw format etc.
For the usual data, movies songs etc. I think we are all good not deleting, but the ability for mass unique these days is growing. I am not sure if in the future this kind of data will grow or die out as the “fad” vanishes or not.
Right now I believe we are on the right track not deleting, but it is a source of debate and no doubt will be more focussed when we get past beta.
The tension is
In a SAFE network where we have anonymity and the security of no snooping etc. then it’s a task for the network to recognise the difference between the above (and more) data types. It cannot decrypt data as @neo said and it never should, so it has no idea what the data is and access/sharing of it tells us little of its importance to humanity in the future
Just the kinda problem we love in this community and company, we will get to it, but just not now, just ot now 
I feel we are good and have made the correct choice right now, but I think it will morph over time and depend on external innovations in disk storage etc. as well.
And some stuff we defo do not want to delete http://sci-hub.cc/ for instance.
I suppose it depends how much you value your time. Personally, it makes more sense for me to be more productive with my time and then buy more storage if needed with the earnings.
Saying that, I can’t barely remember the last time I ran out of storage…
Hi David, Could you give us any brief update on the data chains, how far approx are we from alpha 3 ? thanks !