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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

The obvious rebuttal to your claim is that those services are all centralized.

You can use timestamps from multiple services on the same data. There are many RFC 3161 timestamp services run by different organizations in different countries.

Wordpress could use time-stamping services to prove provenance on postings. That would be useful if Google paid attention to the timestamps.

The obvious rebuttal is, do they need to be decentralized?

To prevent any one party from being able to deceive others about the timestamp.

His claim was:

> You don't need a "blockchain" for timestamps.

He didn't say anything about whether the timestamp services were centralized or not.

So saying "ha, but they're centralized!" is not a rebuttal.

But that's a disingenious argument. The main reason people claim that the blockchain is a good use for timestamps is that nobody can be bribed, or hacked, to change the results.

Given that the blockchain does not solve for human error, the argument for true immutability is not necessary a strict positive.

Well hey, I have and will go on record saying that the Blockchain isn't a panacea for everything - but if you do want to claim that you did X at time Y, a big blockchain is a pretty good way to register that claim.

(Note that I didn't say prove that you ddi thing X at time Y...)

Except in the case of the etherium fork.

True, but that's less of a concern for timestamps, right? You can always point to the original pre-fork chain.

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