Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

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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?

> 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.

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.

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?

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 :)

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