It's easy to charge 5 cents to read an article using Bitcoin. With processing fees, this isn't super easy using credit cards.
Actually that's not it. What I'm saying is that you can have any normal multi-party signature scheme, where every N signing-rounds you ensure some measure of canonical ordering by publishing the hash in the bitcoin blockchain. I think sidechains are probably formulated in a similar fashion but it's been a while since I've looked at exactly what they are doing, the trickier parts if I remember correctly are transfers of value on and off the original chain.