Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

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No need to be so snarky.

Could someone tweak the image? Of course. But as a practical concern, probably less than 20 people have the image manipulation skill it would take to do something like this in the ~20 minute handoff period. The transporters certainly don't. This is a bullshit argument, and you know it. And these pictures are not just of the odometer, but the entire car, including the VIN. Photoshopping all of this believably would cost you more than just paying the damages on a joyride. It's a non-issue.

And I think you're misunderstanding something: the issue is not the time before the transporter get custody of the cars, but the many days that the cars are in transit cross-country. If the timestamp didn't exist at the time the transporter starts their journey, the next handoff knows something is up.

As for already trusting us, our clients do, yes, but the point of this solution is to increase the trust-level of custodianship handoff between people who are not our clients. A blockchain is a great solution for this, and a database is simply an inferior solution. And NO, they don't have to trust us to "push the right data on-chain". This logic runs in a very simple SPA and is immediately verifiable on-chain, without using our software, because the blockchain's global state is open.

I agree with the question: is anything really be solved here? No, not really. A db table of jpegs taken at different points in the hand off is essentially fine too. Carfax seems to so fine without blockchain. And really the bottom line is the end recipient: what recourse is there if the car shows up with too many miles?

The recourse is that the transporter doesn't get paid. Just a small adjustment to incentives massively changes the occurrence of damage to the car or anything similar.

If you're arguing to put everything in a spreadsheet, or have us control the database and do without timestamping, I don't know what to say to you. Blockchain works here. Our business model isn't changing because you're saying we don't need it. Build a system like this yourself and we'll talk about it then.

Carfax is a vertically integrated service with very little of the complexity we're dealing with. And of course you can make do without blockchain. People made do without electricity and power tools. But here it's a cheap, faster, easier to use, and more trusted alternative. What's wrong with that?

If you are the trusted party and your servers are secure, why do you need a blockchain?

We are not the trusted party. I have tried to make this abundantly clear in my other comments.

I think if saying that it’s a simpler, easier solution that provides the guarantees that you need, and the other poster still does not understand this, it’s safe to say you shouldn’t put more effort into this. Thanks for your explanations :)

Why can't you be the trusted party? At the end of the day, one of your servers is involved in the blockchain and using server capacity to do that. Why can't you just use that server capacity to host a simple app where people send the images?

> Build a system like this yourself and we'll talk about it then.

Done. It's an email server. The person shipping the car takes a photograph of the odometer, emails it to the recipient, and then the recipient compares the photograph of the odometer with the car odometer. Any tampering which could be performed on the photo or its timestamp could be done equally to whatever log is entered into the blockchain, and the recipient knows that the photo must have been taken before the date when they received the email.

And if you use gmail, it's free.

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