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by iLoveOncall 1332 days ago
> It is a different level business can be done at. With blockchain we don't trust anyone anything and can prove everything.

No. Anything that is not produced directly on the blockchain cannot be trusted and is not provable. With "proving who you say you are", you cannot prove anything, since you need an off-chain verification saying "Yep this guy is jakupovic because I can see it on his ID".

All you can prove on the blockchain is that someone that has access to the address f9c979ebe8cda1f345b has signed a contract. This doesn't tell you that jakupovic signed, because there is no way to prove on chain that f9c979ebe8cda1f345b is owned by jakupovic. Similarly, there is no on chain way to prove that f9c979ebe8cda1f345b is NOT owned by jakupovic.

Before you bring up having the private key, having the private key means nothing more than "I have the private key". It doesn't mean that the key is really yours, and it doesn't mean that someone else doesn't have the key.

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People have been conned in believing that "This business is using blockchain" is a viable basis for investing into said business. But everyone would laugh if someone said "You should invest in this business because it's using MySQL".

"We use blockchain" is as much a selling point as "We use Swagger". If you believe otherwise, you have been conned.

1 comments

Thank you for describing what I was trying to put forward.

Here if jakupovic == f9c979ebe8cda1f345b then anything signed by f9c979ebe8cda1f345b is the same as being signed by jakupovic in the eye of the law and the blockchain used, also not a lawyer here. For example clicking I agree on an online form is the same as signing a contract, but neither of these can really prove the person "signing" is really who they say they are unless someone is sitting there checking their ID during the signing. This ID checking part is the crypto land promise and not currently possible with tech we have, short of someone sitting there.

You must have misread what I wrote because your answer proves (something that blockchains can't do) that you haven't understood.

> Here if jakupovic == f9c979ebe8cda1f345b

This is the first point you are getting wrong. There is NO WAY to prove that jakupovic == f9c979ebe8cda1f345b.

The only thing you may be able to lawfully prove, if you are yourself jakupovic, is that you have the private key for f9c979ebe8cda1f345b. You can also lawfully prove that you are jakupovic, because you have an official ID that says so. But there is NO WAY for the blockchain to link your official ID to your private key, because your official ID is not issued on chain.

> then anything signed by f9c979ebe8cda1f345b is the same as being signed by jakupovic in the eye of the law and the blockchain used

The first point is wrong anyway, but thinking that your blockchain has any legal weight is simply laughable.

Otherwise it would mean that if I somehow gain access to your private key, and sign a contract saying that your house, an off chain entity, is now mine.

> This ID checking part is the crypto land promise and not currently possible with tech we have, short of someone sitting there.

Well that's funny because if you use DocuSign you will be connected to someone that will verify your official ID, and verify that it matches your face. Same when I opened my bank account online, I got put on a call and had to show my ID. So it is absolutely possible with the tech we have, and it is already heavily used.

> For example clicking I agree on an online form is the same as signing a contract, but neither of these can really prove the person "signing" is really who they say they are unless someone is sitting there checking their ID during the signing.

As explained above, blockchain doesn't solve that. Blockchain literally does not solve anything, because it cannot prove anything that did not originate on chain, and the only things that originate on chain are tokens, which themselves have no value outside of the blockchain.

You go through all this trouble to prove that blockchain is useless and yet keep coming up with examples where it's useful. Too much to respond to but this point: "Well that's funny because if you use DocuSign you will be connected to someone that will verify your official ID, and verify that it matches your face." Here you describe "Docusign chain" which does have the property of linking ID to public id/key and is useful.

But it's better that Docusign describe their use of blockchains, since 2015, in their words https://www.docusign.com/products/blockchain. Pretty sure that invalidates your conclusion, too, "As explained above, blockchain doesn't solve that. Blockchain literally does not solve anything"

Docusign is a centralised trusted 3rd party which performs ID verification and holds hashes of signed documents. This doesn't require blockchain. They were performing this service before they offered anything related to blockchain.
> But it's better that Docusign describe their use of blockchains, since 2015, in their words https://www.docusign.com/products/blockchain.

You should read the link you shared, because it would become evident to you that they offer customers to connect their Web3 application to DocuSign, not that they rely on blockchain for their service.

But they use Blockchain which in turn makes it useful, do I really need to spell this out.