The Right to Be Forgotten Is Impossible on a Blockchain
Blockchain technology is promoted as a tool for transparency, trust, and decentralization. Its defining feature is immutability: once data is written to a blockchain, it cannot be altered or removed. This paper argues that immutability makes blockchain fundamentally incompatible with the right to be forgotten, a privacy right recognized in the GDPR, the Indian DPDP Act, and similar data protection laws worldwide. A blockchain that stores personal data creates a permanent record that no individual can delete and no court can order removed. We examine the legal collision between immutability and erasure rights, identify real blockchain applications that already violate data protection law, and argue that blockchain is not a privacy technology. It is a permanence technology. Permanence and privacy are opposites.