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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

Because the ceremony of a signature has been socially recognised for thousands of years. That's what our society expects.

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>Because the ceremony of a signature

Come to think of it, I remember "signing" pdfs in adobe reader by clicking a form field that produced a signature similar to[1]:

   John Smith
   Digitally signed by
   CN=John Smith
   [...]

This would satisfy the "ceremony" requirement. According to adobe[2] it looks like you can do this with self signed certificates, so it's completely free as well. But this option is significantly less popular than hellosign/docusign. I guess the value-add for them is having a web interface, but I'm not convinced it's worth the $150/year (significantly more for "business" or "enterprise" plans) for a web interface that essentially signs pdfs with self-signed certificates.

[1] https://helpx.adobe.com/content/dam/help/en/acrobat/11/using...

[2] https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/11/using/signing-pdfs.html#S...

You can even satisfy the ceremony of signature in a pdf document by inserting your hand drawn signature in Preview.

Goodluck with that holding up in court.

I think docusign has the best sustinct summary of the bare requirements needed for a electronicly signed document to be recognized as legally binding.

https://www.docusign.com/learn/us-electronic-signature-laws-...

The main benefit is around workflows. First and foremost, if you are in a position where you need external people to sign documents (say you're a photographer and need signed releases), it's a lot easier to send someone a link to the standard document and get them to sign a release then to email them and then call the person and walk them through digitally signing a document. Especially if you're doing this 50+ times a year. And you typically get the documents signed much quicker. It's pretty much the difference between having to mail in a check for every payment vs using a web portal. It's more convenient and there's a faster turnaround time. Oh and you've removed the risk that something isn't signed correctly (was there a section that wasn't initialed?) or that something was redlined. It's certainly not for everyone or every business, but there are certain use cases where the money is well worth it.

It's also a huge win if you need multiple people to sign a document.

Without a tool like HelloSign you need to email the document to each person one by one to get everyone to sign on the same "paper". It's a mess and takes up a lot of time and coordination.

With HelloSign (and other similar tools), you can just send out an email with a link to everyone at once. They can sign the document asynchronously in whichever order they want, and when everyone has done that, you get a notification.

So many people still put such huge value on the "handwritten signature" part. Even though it isn't actually that strong (the digital signature from even a self-signed certificate is definitely stronger), the ceremony of having something that you need to scrawl with your fingers or a stylus/pen still matters psychologically to so many people.

(At a past job I was asked to work on a digital signature product and very much the core and just about only requirement was digital ink square that worked on an iPad. Everything else didn't matter so long as they had some bitmap of some scrawl that someone attempted with a finger or an iPad stylus.)

It’s only free for a certain number of signatures per form. Then you need to buy some server side tool from Adobe, and $150/yr seems cheap.

Adobe's failure to make this easy and free is the problem. How HelloSign gets away with not also embedding digital signatures is the amazing part. Physical signatures are terrible security, at least when we switch to digital make it better, not worse.

Adobe still gets a piece of the pie with their stupid certificate extortion scheme.

Want a green check box in reader, provider cumbersome instructions for your end users to trust public cert . Or pay adobe their annual fee for a special signing cert..

MacOS’s preview app also allows you to e-sign.

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