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hollyhoppet wrote

we already have a system for notarizing things it's called electronic notarization

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twovests OP wrote

Wouldn't these not have as strong of a timestamp? My understanding is that the only benefit of notarizing """on a blockchain""" is that there are a lot of copies of the database everywhere with the same timestamp, and that there are some blockchain-based enotaries out there?

I don't mean this rhetorically, I've never actually used a notary (electronic or otherwise) so this is a gap in my knowledge (I don't know what to search for to fill that)

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hollyhoppet wrote

notarization at its core is a government endorsed person called a notary says "yes this document is official and i've seen it." why does a timestamp matter?

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twovests OP wrote

if i want to be able to prove that i had something notarized at a specific time

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hollyhoppet wrote

e-notary services do this already without a blockchain and i'd trust a notary as a source of proof more than anything blockchain related

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flabberghaster wrote

I think the only thing using a block chain buys you over a normal notary is that everyone can see that the notary signed off on it in real time, so that if you have a corrupt notary (or one gets hacked) and they sign off on something while claiming they saw it before they actually did, people would be able to prove it.

You could however, make the signatures public without a block chain type scheme, to achieve this.

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twovests OP wrote

been thinking about this and the big problem is (1) i have to place trust in a local trump supporter who's great grandfather's middle name was honestly "wigglesworth" and (2) so does everyone else

that's fine if i'm interacting with a government and we're all pretending government works, but what if i want to notarize something to real people?

well, cryptotrash hasn't gotten usable for anyone to use it

and i think committing the document (or a hash of it) to a public github repo is good enough, for as long as github exists. any site with timestamps people trust

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