[hkhanna]

One of the tough things about a party-controlled, self-hosted e-signature is that it becomes easier to repudiate because a party to the contract has custody of the platform.

The non-custodial party can claim they never signed, and when the custodial party produces evidence of IP address and timestamp, the non-custodial party may have a credible argument that they are faked and the person asserting those authenticated details has the motive and means to fake them.

That argument is much harder to assert with something like DocuSign because it is unlikely DocuSign would put their business on the line to fake someone's signature.

I'm not saying repudiation based on custody of the e-signature platform is a winning argument, but it's something to consider before self-hosting if you are going to use the platform to sign your own contracts.

[dboreham]

If only someone would invent a public nonrepudiatable ledger.

[yencabulator]

The problem is that it would require everyone to monitor the ledger for falsified versions of their own signature. That works a lot better in the world of Certificate Transparency where Google can scan for google.com registrations. It does not scale well to every human being doing that, or outsourcing it.

The fundamental challenge here is that there's no way to tell, based on a the signature alone, which signatures are "valid" and which are "forged"; they're not cryptographic signatures. And getting cryptographic signatures for lay people is apparently too hard to do, outside of Estonia's digital citizenship initiatives.

It might be neat if the big guys agreed on an OIDC extension that let you piggyback text to be affirmed by the user. Cryptographic proof that [e-mail] saw text with hash H at time T and chose "Accept".

[jabradoodle]

Your pointing it out like this should be be obvious, and it is. Yet Blockchain has not become a mainstream use case here.

[ooterness]

Like a chain of blocks? Where each block is signed by adding a prefix that produces an increasingly difficult hash?

[cseleborg]

Wait... You're talking about Git, right? Brilliant idea! You could sign a pull request, and once it's signed, you can then merge the businesses. But how do you show a diff of the signature? And what if it's not for a corporate merger?

[xur17]

But what keeps someone from forking your git repository and insisting that their HEAD is the source of truth? How can we get a globally agreed upon source of truth?

[TheNewsIsHere]

That’s just crazy talk. Corporate mergers are the only transactions there are!

[yokem55]

It could probably be done with a merkle based signature log that whoever is hosting the service could provide.

To cheat, the party hosting it would probably have to forge signatures for everyone after the disputed signature.

[yencabulator]

As long as we're talking about non-cryptographic-signatures, the party hosting the e-signing software can claim any signature to have happened at any time. The whole point was DocuSign would be unlikely to do this.

[snapplebobapple]

someone should combine a chain of blocks for identity management with one for financial transactions/tokens and one for signature attestation. We could call it the cube chain and usher in web 4.0.....

[shmichael]

I have Zero Knowledge about this topic

[mdekkers]

Yeah, I really like this initiative, but this is not a technology problem. This is a trust problem. The EUJ actually has a not-terrible framework in place around electronic signatures, and _some_ countries are pushing hard for adoption and implementation.

[lesuorac]

> That argument is much harder to assert with something like DocuSign because it is unlikely DocuSign would put their business on the line to fake someone's signature.

This seems like the claim that the USG will be unlikely to put it's Military on the line so they won't leak any tank designs on discord.

Happy to concede that the CEO of DocuSign wouldn't do this but surely some 15$/h employee doesn't have that same opinion.

[mc32]

The support person should not have that kind of access without auditability and traceability. Even Sundar should not be able to log into a console and read your emails either.

[lesuorac]

Sure but that's a different argument than the one presented above.

[mc32]

Someone implied that counterfeiting a sig or altering one, etc. was just as easy in Docusign as it would be with on on-site one-party controlled system. It just isn't.