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Comment by DSingularity | Hacker News Reader

Hehe. Thats actually a nice artifact, thanks bitcoin. Now individuals can consider the potential of ideas to pan out and participate in funding them. Sure, sounds good -- I'll throw in 1,000$. Suddenly 1,000 like-minded individuals can satisfy the need of projects. Of course thats not always so popular here ;-). I should just mind my own business and focus on the coding right?

Anyhow. I do think you are right. The integrity of the data has to be questioned. But I question why we have to assume that its useless just because it cannot be trusted? This paper trail is immutable. That is valuable. Future evidence can expose prior lies. Once you know that you have to maintain a lie for life, suddenly you are questioning if its really worth making.

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Immutability is easy to achieve. Anything distributed widely enough is effectively immutable. Anything published on the cover of Time magazine is immutable. Anything commited to the linux kernel is immutable. Anything distributed on thepiratebay is immutable. Anything put in the Ubuntu package repository is immutable.

You can amend it and publish new versions but you can be sure that somebody somewhere will have a copy. You want to make your paper trail immutable? Sign it and publish it widely using any medium you want. Burn it on CDs and mail them to random addresses. Tie them to balloons and release them.

Man trusting paper more at this point is the most backward thing I've heard. You really want us to keep using paper for all contracts, needing to be on site to sign documents, sending documents through fax, making physical backups... when all of it can be done digitally?

You an achieve the same results from writing things to a git repo and publishing it. Any edits on previous commits would result in the entire repo being changed. Publish it to the world, push every commit hash on twitter/RSS/Email. Done.

Or just use a merkle hash tree like CT logs do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency#Certi...

A merkle hash tree is what all of those (Git, Bitcoin and CT) use. BT just made it distributed.

Funnily enough, CT was devised around four years after bitcoin and mentions it in their introduction article: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2668154

Thanks for the link. Was looking for something like this, but couldn't find it.

> This paper trail is immutable. That is valuable.

It is only valuable on the blockchain if its cost to maintain is less than, say, a mid-sized country worth of electricity.

Who will be the miners required for this blockchain? Who will pay for the mining? Who will ensure there is no 51% attack on the blockchain?

" Now individuals can consider the potential of ideas to pan out and participate in funding them. Sure, sounds good -- I'll throw in 1,000$. Suddenly 1,000 like-minded individuals can satisfy the need of projects."

You mean Kickstarter, which has nothing to do with blockchain?

"Anyhow. I do think you are right. The integrity of the data has to be questioned. But I question why we have to assume that its useless just because it cannot be trusted? This paper trail is immutable. That is valuable. Future evidence can expose prior lies. Once you know that you have to maintain a lie for life, suddenly you are questioning if its really worth making."

Says who? Both Bitcoin and Etherium have gone through forks of their chains.

>You mean Kickstarter, which has nothing to do with blockchain?

Blockchain is having all of the functionality (and more) of Kickstarter with 10-20x more reach. Also, explain how you would use kickstarter to crowd-fund a gold-backed digital currency without Blockchain?

>Says who? Both Bitcoin and Etherium have gone through forks of their chains

The whole point if a Blockchain is you can tell if it's been forked, and really forks are just the exception proving the rule of immutability. Meaningful forks have happened a handful of times and they've been heavily publicized. How many times has a bank issued a chargeback?

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