Accidentally published a useless contract when working in Remix. How can I withdraw the contract from IPFS? Should I care?

Question

I am working on a versity exercise, a small and basic contract. Beginner as I am and tired as I was, I accidentally pressed Publish to IPFS instead of the Deploy button.

How would I withdraw that decision?

In this case, the contract was not finished and quite useless, the code not working, publishing makes no sense, it is just spamming the system.

I found some insight at Is it safe to publish to IPFS when deploying in Remix? where it says that this published contract has just the purpose of verification for anyone using it. Which makes no sense in this case.

I also prefer not to share it since you just usually should not publish solutions of any educational exercise, code of conduct. On the other hand, I could leave it published as such, no drama, no one will care or get the idea of searching through IPFS anyway. I am just curious whether I could withdraw that contract at all from IPFS, and whether I should do it to keep the IPFS clean from useless files.

Answer 1

TL;DR You can't and you shouldn't care.

This can be a bit off-topic, but IPFS is not an immutable ledger, not at all. When you publish via Remix, it at first tries with a local IPFS node, if it's not found it tries with Infura public node (https://ipfs.infura.io:5001/api/v0/add?pin=true) and it asks to pin (to keep in cache) the content for some time.

It's up to the IPFS node (in this case the Infura node) to decide how long to keep the information available to other peers, usually, it gets deleted from cache (unpinned) if no peers request it after some time.

Because IPFS is a Content-Addressable Network - where the URIs to get a piece of information are based on the content of that information - if you don't share the resulting hash of the contract no peers will be able to ask Infura for that content, and it will get eventually deleted even from their cache.