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Comment by smrq | Hacker News Reader

Paranoid response: if such a versioning ledger were to exist, how could you trust it? The feasibility problem still remains (it is feasible to alter archives that were formerly infeasible) and you now rely on trust that (1) all alterations are accompanied by a versioning notice, and (2) the summary presented in the notice is accurate and complete.

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>Paranoid response: if such a versioning ledger were to exist, how could you trust it?

Blockchain to the rescue (for real this time, I think, I'm not an expert or a blockchain fanboy). A publicly ledger that anyone can verify hasn't been tampered with is the whole point.

Why not just provide a hash for each version of the document?

But that just changes the problem to one of archiving the hashes immutably.

Which is what blockchain does. We're experimenting with using it to create audit logs of data, which can't be tampered with.

That's essentially what a blockchain is, except you also include the previous hash in the version you're hashing, so that changing one record invalidates all future hashes.

That’s exactly how this kind of this is done, using a blockchain. Here is an example of using Tierion (blockchain) to stores hashes of accounting documents, in order to create a probable audit log. https://medium.com/tierion/xero-integrates-with-tierion-to-s...

It seems like the same concept would apply to storing hashes of any other document, such as a newspaper article.

Really, git is a blockchain, and it's exactly what you want for this.

It’s far to easy to rewrite history in git.

You are completely correct, I wonder why folks downvoted this.

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