Comment by elwin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elwin | Hacker News Reader

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> Please explain how a bitcoin blockchain record can testify in court that a copy of a document is authentic. Hint, you're infront of a jury, you have a blockchain hash, and opposing council has a notary public with 40 years of experience, both copies of the document differ, the original cannot be found. Hers has an official looking seal, you have some random numbers.

Here's an imaginary possibility. A hundred and fifty years from now, courtrooms come with computer systems built from scratch and operated by court clerks. Their sole purpose is verifying blockchain records. The jury knows to trust the machine. In fact, the jury instructions tell them to.

None of the jury members have ever seen official documents on physical paper. They only know about paper documents from watching historical fiction movies. In such movies, the possibility that the documents are forged is always a major plot factor.

I think in practice, the first time someone needed to do this, a bunch of high grade academic cryptographers would acts as expert witnesses pro-bono. From there, it would be like a hacking case - an expert explains the issue to the jury, who take a decision. Assuming it is technically sound, bitchain certification would win.

Subsequent cases would be able to use the precedent, and win with less interesting experts.

These comments are actually making me think of this case:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howland_will_forgery_trial

I've faced these authentication issues in Asia and the Middle East. There is an increasing willingness of authorities to trust non-traditional means of authentication through neutral third parties. For example, I recent pointed to a commercial corporate records provider as a source of authentication of a foreign corporation being in good standing and the local Middle Eastern authority was willing to go online, look for themselves and conclude that the information was correct. I beleive that such forward-thinking authorities will begin to participate in BTC hashing and be willing to gather the information for themselves.

If you think about it, this is a lot more convincing than getting a ribbon-covered document from a foreign jurisdiction that you may not be able to read, even if it authenticated by a series of trusted authorities (a chain of embassies in this case).

Bitcoin might let you say things like "both parties signed this document on this date" but you will still need a jury to decide "Action [foo] does or does not constitute a violation of this document which they both signed on this date".

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