If I personally published a signed merkle tree... I think I'm too much of a nobody for people to download it to keep me honest you know. Unless I pay them to do it of course.
So then the problem is, I need to go to some entity that is famous enough. And I need my tree to connect to theirs. And all this on the cheap. I'm not a aware of any such thing in existence.
Another nice thing about the blockchain is that the timestamps of the signatures are provable.
And also nice is that there are no record keepers to whom which pressure can be applied.
If I personally published a signed merkle tree... I think I'm too much of a nobody for people to download it to keep me honest you know. Unless I pay them to do it of course.
In the original scenario I assumed that there were third party people interested in detecting or even preventing modification of articles after they're published. If nobody cares about it then the whole thing is moot to begin with.
If your scenario is that you'd like to be able to timestamp data that has value to you but not others (say, something patent-related) then it's a different scenario and then yes, the blockchain might make sense, although you could also use many other trusted, albeit centralized, third parties to achieve the same thing. Making a public post of Facebook or some other big website for instance. The incentives would have to be very high for these companies to modify post dates for a scam. Even more so if you post it to several websites. I think there are also services who will add your signature to a merkle tree and then publish it in a newspaper for instance.
But I agree that in this situation publishing the hash on a blockchain is actually a good solution. It's simple and easy to program for. But keep in mind that this only works as long as the currency is valuable enough to keep miners honest and rewarded for their work (otherwise people will be able to attack the blockchain and rewrite history). So if a cryptocurrency fails and its value collapses then suddenly your proofs become worthless as a side effect.
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If I personally published a signed merkle tree... I think I'm too much of a nobody for people to download it to keep me honest you know. Unless I pay them to do it of course.
So then the problem is, I need to go to some entity that is famous enough. And I need my tree to connect to theirs. And all this on the cheap. I'm not a aware of any such thing in existence.
Another nice thing about the blockchain is that the timestamps of the signatures are provable.
And also nice is that there are no record keepers to whom which pressure can be applied.
In the original scenario I assumed that there were third party people interested in detecting or even preventing modification of articles after they're published. If nobody cares about it then the whole thing is moot to begin with.
If your scenario is that you'd like to be able to timestamp data that has value to you but not others (say, something patent-related) then it's a different scenario and then yes, the blockchain might make sense, although you could also use many other trusted, albeit centralized, third parties to achieve the same thing. Making a public post of Facebook or some other big website for instance. The incentives would have to be very high for these companies to modify post dates for a scam. Even more so if you post it to several websites. I think there are also services who will add your signature to a merkle tree and then publish it in a newspaper for instance.
But I agree that in this situation publishing the hash on a blockchain is actually a good solution. It's simple and easy to program for. But keep in mind that this only works as long as the currency is valuable enough to keep miners honest and rewarded for their work (otherwise people will be able to attack the blockchain and rewrite history). So if a cryptocurrency fails and its value collapses then suddenly your proofs become worthless as a side effect.