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Comment by spencerXsmith | Hacker News Reader

From what I understand about blockchain, these databases are append-only, right? Meaning someone can't go back and alter the past entries? That kind of assurance could be really useful in this space.

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Yes correct. The immutability and provenance of data are key characteristics that make blockchain useful here.

Thank you!

What happens if someone adds incorrect entries by accident or intentionally?

How do you ensure parity between the real world and the Blockchain?

you can build document versioning into a blockchain-backed protocol - I would assume that Digibuild have done this as documents can be both corrected and extended over time. The important factor being that the old version is not erased and thus you can see the history of the document, which could be beneficial.

But how do you know that what is on the Blockchain matches the real world?

This is the core to if a Blockchain can be trusted for anything which does not originate on the Blockchain.

By uploading said information you are claiming it is true. Whether other people believe it to be true depends on whether they trust you or otherwise have verified for themselves (which can also be asserted cryptographically).

No digital technology can solve epistemology and tell you what is true - but that's not the point, and blockchain applications are not unique in this.

> No digital technology can solve epistemology and tell you what is true

Exactly. So what is the point? Why is this better than GitHub?

I think a lot of companies, when talking about blockchain technology, really mean a merkle tree - distributed or not, with proof of stake/work or not. The whole point being to cryptographically prove things like chain of custody, who is asserting what facts etc. The benefit to such tools is transparency, which helps in low-trust environments.

I'm pretty sceptical of blockchain applications in general because it became one of the word examples of a technobabble buzzword, but in this case I can see the argument for it.

Thanks for the help you, you took the words out of my mouth haha......Per the question about a previous entry, a prior entry could always be cancelled out with a new entry. Remember business is still take place on the front end and the blockchain is a back end ledger to verify the data...In the real world, if you accidentally sent an incorrect contract and that metadata hit the ledger, the user would simply cancel the 1st contract and send a new one, this would append the ledger and one could see that a previous version was cancelled and a new contract sent. There are also ways to to verify version history as was mentioned in that previous comment.

> What happens if someone adds incorrect entries by accident or intentionally?

If you think about it, git is itself a block chain, and doesn't suffer from that issue.

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