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this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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I liked the public ledger of contracts idea someone had. You use the public block chain to sign and store stuff like mortgages, that way everyone sees the same copy.
The problem is that there are much-simpler ways to achieve that, if that's all you want. You just take a digital copy of the contract, timestamp it, and have each party cryptographically sign the contract. You don't need a distributed ledger for that.
Distribution ensure integrity of data. Let's say we sign a contract, cryptographically sign it and all that good stuff but then oh no, where we stored your contract went up in fire and now I don't have to honour that contract. (contrived example I know)
All parties who are involved in the contract can store a copy of a contract, even if it's not distributed to everyone else.
The signing ensures the integrity of the data, whether using a public block chain or not.
The signed document can be distributed as widely as you'd like - it doesn't need to be attached to a block chain to do this.