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Comment by retube | Hacker News Reader

Cool, yes, one use case: you can stick document hashes in to the block chain to prove document state at some point in time. This no doubt has legal uses, and perhaps scientests too although I think less so.

Re your shipping manifest example - can you expand on this - how does this work?

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Basically, when I load up your ship, I document all the stuff I am loading on to the ship in a Bill of Lading. You agree that all of that stuff is present and you're now responsible for it. At the other end of the shipping route you present the Bill of Lading and show that all the goods are present and intact.

If this document is digital, then I might get screwed if you lose stuff or stuff gets damaged and you remove it from the Bill of Lading and say you never saw the goods. Or you might get screwed if I add new stuff to the Bill of Lading after you load the goods and claim you didn't deliver it. So one way to solve this is to put the document and both of our signatures in a blockchain, and now we all agree that this is what we saw on that date.

cool thanks

Once the manifest has been added to the blockchain, it can no longer be altered or removed. This means that the receiver can publicly acknowledge having received the goods it paid for, and won't be able to retract that acknowledgement.

The main point is that, unlike a situation where you would be using a centralized database, there is no need to have a central trusted party to operate the database - the source of trust is distributed among the mining power of all nodes in the network.

thanks

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