Comment by scubbo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scubbo | Hacker News Reader

(Disclaimer - I believe myself to have a better idea of what a blockchain is and how it works than the average layman, but I'm certainly not an expert)

Having recently completed a house purchase and waded my way through reams of paperwork in the process, I'm stunned that there's no "document provenance chain" implementation. At every stage of the process, I was presented with tens or hundreds of pages of paperwork that I was expected to sign, most of which was exactly the same as the paperwork I had approved in the previous round, with changes only on a page or two to reflect the renegotiated terms. However - I had no proof of that similarity, and so I had to read through every page to verify it for myself. If I could have had a programmatic way to show that a) changes only occurred in the following places, and b) the original document that I reviewed is the same as a blessed authoritative template provided by some trusted independent party, the whole process would have gone a lot faster.

Actually, now I come to think of it, this wouldn't even need blockchain - it could just be Version Control, right?

I'm not sure that you even need full version control (as in, the bit where everyone involved uses the same system) — if you just have a good diff algorithm, that would let you check what's changed since you last read the document.

I've seen companies like https://draftable.com providing exactly that (seemingly targeted at lawyers and people who do this all day) and it seems to work pretty well.

Microsoft Word has a great diff - it's used all the time when drawing up contracts.

https://www.howtogeek.com/339166/how-to-use-microsoft-words-...

For those that would like to use the feature.

Right, all you need is a hashed object that includes the hash of the previous version. Git / most DVCSes are built on this but even they are more complicated than what you need.

What you actually want, I think, is a legal document that says "The parties hereby amend the contract previously agreed to on mm/dd/yy as follows: after paragraph 5, add .... For reference, a full copy of the amended contract is included. In the case of discrepancies, this description of changes, and not the following copy, is authoritative."

The contracts (for any commercial transaction) are not agreed until they are finally signed. Until then the contracts are being amended by the parties, and generally with tracked changes.

There are contact/document editing tools that already show the change history and any redlines or additions. Even office can do this I think.

Yeah might get away with just version control. If my understanding of blockchains is correct, which it almost certainly isn't, then the core features you're after would exist in the overlap between a distributed VCS and a block chain, i.e. a series of commits, where I can verify that my sequence is the same as yours, and that both of ours are the same as the governments.

You don't even need git for this, just diff is probably enough.

> it could just be Version Control, right?

Or just a list of sha256 hashes.

Microsoft Word can compare documents.

Blockchain's value is in the distributed ledger. A home purchase has a small number of well-known parties. Doing digital complex financial transactions with a browser and HTTPS has been proven thoroughly effective. Real estate is still hindered by the model of agents and lawyers many of whom are in small operations or affiliated with a firm, but still operating independently. Most don't have the scale or the expertise to automate their processes the way they could be. But once it finally happens, it will probably just be forms on a web site like anything else.

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