Hacker News Reader

If the point is continued legal meaning then it would be better to digitally publish in any way that allows distributed verification of the record as what was published and not challenged.

Probably thousands of people have some means to tamper with that archive, but courts don't really care to revisit hundred year old wills in the ways soap operas imply.

This argument makes it seem like forged documents were never a thing.

It’s more that the risks and expenditure of effort are so different between changing files on a server vs breaking and entering that it becomes a separate category.

True but scanning them makes it a lot harder to determine if the original was a forgery.

True. You're at the mercy of whatever information was captured at the time using means available at the time. One reason we (hopefully) don't get rid of physical evidence from criminal cases.

In practice these are more of historical than legal interest.

That must be why that Bitcoin thing didn't pan out.

Huh? It's very strong at the moment

Very debatable, if both are done right.