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Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

A stack of papers going back years showing that the corporate entity you're dealing with confirms that you payed them on time for years feels a lot better defense than:

I do agree with this sentiment, but I would like to point out that one can achieve the same effect (or very nearly so) by saving the "receipt" page or confirmation page that you usually get with online transactions. You could either save a directory full of PDF's and only print them out if there actually is a need for them in court, or you could even print them as you encounter them and build up that "big stack of papers" over time.

Yes this imposes extra friction, which does suck, but it's something.

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Yeah, this is true.

But I personally like having paper that the corporation printed out versus something that I printed out. Like, technically, you can fake the "receipt" page because it's just some html etc. The only thing that proves that what you have is real is the confirmation number and suddenly you're back to hoping that the corporation that asserts you owe them money has and will provide all of their sql databases so that you can show that your confirmation number is genuine.

On the other hand, if I have years of documents they produced and the styles and layout, paper quality, postal records, etc all match what everyone else has in their homes, then, yeah, it could still be faked, but it's a much harder pill for a judge to swallow. Like, at some point people are going to decide that you're either telling the truth or you are a super genius with way too much time on your hands. Either way they're going to tend towards letting you off the hook.

One possibility is signed PDF's. You can verify that the corporation created the document, that it has not been changed. That is more security than a piece of paper. You can forge a document.

It's not really compelling to a jury though. Digital signature verification is just a magical computer saying something that the expert witness fails to explain very well.

Meanwhile, the jury can look at 200 bill receipts and see the age of the paper for themselves. Like, yeah it could be faked, but it means they were planning on faking something for 20 years.

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