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I hear this a lot, blockchain is going to replace X accepted industry solution. I always go back to, who’s going to invest in actually building the new blockcha

I hear this a lot, blockchain is going to replace X accepted industry solution. I always go back to, who’s going to invest in actually building the new blockchain solution and for what reason? Big companies pay other big companies like Docusign to figure it out for them and they pay a premium for not having to deal with it themselves. Blockchain as a technology really doesn’t offer a lot of practical advantage over traditional tech in a three party signature system. When I hear startups sell on the fact that their solution uses blockchain and is somehow inherently better for it, I turn and walk the other direction. Same for AI/ML, BigData, etc.

wallacoloo 5y ago
> I always go back to, who’s going to invest in actually building the new blockchain solution and for what reason? blockchain is really hot with VCs these days, so that’s who. why? the rewards for a document signing product are large — as evidenced by new traditional companies entering the space (HelloSign). basing a new competitor in this space off of blockchain offers differentiation. despite being less mature or feature rich, you get prime access to one area of the market that none of your competitors can easily serve. that is, you get your first, profitable, customers way faster and they become a core source of revenue to build out from there.
- rubyfan 5y ago
  I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. That there is money to be made on industry solutions is not in dispute. The point in dispute is that decentralized blockchain based solution makes any sense. Other than to attract VCs who don’t know any better to give you capital, blockchain offers no competitive advantage to an upstart or really a competitive threat to the incumbents. Further I see no desirable “differentiation” for a customer to be interested. It doesn’t in fact even solve a customer problem. It’s just noise.
  - wallacoloo 5y ago
    > Further I see no desirable “differentiation” for a customer to be interested. It doesn’t in fact even solve a customer problem. document signing is just another form of attestation (“i agree to the terms outlined in this document, effective on <date of signing>”. blockchains are really good at providing tools for attestation. the specific customer advantage? it’s extremely difficult for your counterparty to claim that he didn’t sign your term sheet if he changes his mind. you just point to some record on the blockchain and say “this has your digital signature on it. it says you agreed to those terms, and it was published at <date/time>”. obviously, DocuSign solves this problem of attestation, by custodianing the documents and putting meaningful reputation on the line in order to remain trustworthy. OTOH, it’s not unheard of to see for-profit companies cash out their reputation (e.g. big brands which sell the brand/logo to cheap manufacturers once the company stops innovating). attestations on a large blockchain (like Bitcoin or Ethereum) augment that reputational cost with a financial cost: even if Docusign decided to cash out their reputation, it would cost billions of dollars to reverse the attestation: a significant barrier. so it depends on how much you — or the parties you deal with (ex: courts) — trust Docusign. it’s not inconceivable to me that at least a handful of customers might say “i don’t completely trust that any document middleman will not lie about my counterparty’s attestation down the road. but i do trust that blockchain B is secure enough to prevent reversals, so this blockchain-based document signing service might be a better product for me.”
    - rubyfan 5y ago
      You suggest Docusign could compromise their core business and therefore the customer problem is lack of trust in Docusign? So how big is such a market of potential customers that don’t trust Docusign to not tamper with the attestation? I’d hypothesize the potential customer segment is very small. Big companies that need Docusign have incentive enough to get it right and typically have rigorous standards to making decisions like this. If lack of trust were an issue with customers, Docusign will have solved that issue already. Trust is not likely an issue for customers. For choosing a Docusign over a Hellosign, price at scale however is an issue. If blockchain solved the cost at scale issue then you’d be on to something but I don’t think it does. Other tech solutions like S3 or R2 probably have a more material impact on a real customer problem like cost at scale than blockchain could hope to. Though I’d guess the cost Docusign and others charge has little to do with underlying data storage or infrastructure costs.
  - knurled99 5y ago
    So my friend and I have actually built a blockchain-based esignature app recently, because there are a couple advantages of using blockchain. One is privacy - you don’t actually have to share the document being signed with our application; we never store it and never have access to it. This is because what is actually signed and stored in the blockchain is a hash based on your document. So if there’s anything sensitive in a doc that you’re signing, there’s no risk of a hacker getting into our app and leaking that to the world. Another advantage is that it gives you a publicly accessible way of proving that a digital file existed in a given state on a given day and time - anyone with the document can later go back and validate that the copy they have is the one that existed on that date and time. The value add of the blockchain is that this information is publicly available on a distributed network that uses encryption and requires agreement among the nodes in the network, so it is functionally impossible to go back and tamper with it later. Couple other advantages, but they aren’t necessarily differentiated by virtue of the app being on blockchain - one is speed and ease of use, because there’s no uploading or recreating digital signatures. You just identify a document to sign, ensure both parties have possession of and wish to sign the same thing, and click to sign. The other is the ability to quickly and easily use our simple REST API to add this kind of e-signature and document verification capability into your own app. This is especially useful for anyone who’d like to memorialize some information in the blockchain but doesn’t want to deal with figuring out how to do that directly. Edited to add the name of the app - Indestamp.com
    - rubyfan 5y ago
      Congrats on making something - I wish you luck. I don’t think blockchain adds anything novel to the functionality you describe. The ability to get a cryptographic hash of a document has existed for a very long time. As have signature files that can be published publicly. As has archive.org. I don’t believe the blockchain adds anything here other than maybe longevity and I’m dubious of even that. FYI - when I click ‘Get started’ nothing happens.
      - knurled99 5y ago
        Ah yes, thanks for pointing that out… this is so new that while the app is working great the website is not fully functional yet. There was a working version on the lab version of our site; we just pushed a change to the main site so the button works now. It just takes you to a sign up form. All valid points about hashes being nothing new, etc. We used blockchain because it was a means to accomplish what we feel is a better way of digitally signing documents. We think there’s value in signing docs on the blockchain and that there’s a need for an easy way to do so, largely among people who are doing other things within blockchain. We are not claiming there’s no other way to skin that cat. I understand why you might run the other way if someone’s claiming their app is great because blockchain. But I also don’t think it’s true that any app that uses blockchain technology adds no value because you could’ve used another technology or simply because blockchain.

wallacoloo 5y ago

> I always go back to, who’s going to invest in actually building the new blockchain solution and for what reason? blockchain is really hot with VCs these days, so that’s who. why? the rewards for a document signing product are large — as evidenced by new traditional companies entering the space (HelloSign). basing a new competitor in this space off of blockchain offers differentiation. despite being less mature or feature rich, you get prime access to one area of the market that none of your competitors can easily serve. that is, you get your first, profitable, customers way faster and they become a core source of revenue to build out from there.

rubyfan 5y ago
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. That there is money to be made on industry solutions is not in dispute. The point in dispute is that decentralized blockchain based solution makes any sense. Other than to attract VCs who don’t know any better to give you capital, blockchain offers no competitive advantage to an upstart or really a competitive threat to the incumbents. Further I see no desirable “differentiation” for a customer to be interested. It doesn’t in fact even solve a customer problem. It’s just noise.
- wallacoloo 5y ago
  > Further I see no desirable “differentiation” for a customer to be interested. It doesn’t in fact even solve a customer problem. document signing is just another form of attestation (“i agree to the terms outlined in this document, effective on <date of signing>”. blockchains are really good at providing tools for attestation. the specific customer advantage? it’s extremely difficult for your counterparty to claim that he didn’t sign your term sheet if he changes his mind. you just point to some record on the blockchain and say “this has your digital signature on it. it says you agreed to those terms, and it was published at <date/time>”. obviously, DocuSign solves this problem of attestation, by custodianing the documents and putting meaningful reputation on the line in order to remain trustworthy. OTOH, it’s not unheard of to see for-profit companies cash out their reputation (e.g. big brands which sell the brand/logo to cheap manufacturers once the company stops innovating). attestations on a large blockchain (like Bitcoin or Ethereum) augment that reputational cost with a financial cost: even if Docusign decided to cash out their reputation, it would cost billions of dollars to reverse the attestation: a significant barrier. so it depends on how much you — or the parties you deal with (ex: courts) — trust Docusign. it’s not inconceivable to me that at least a handful of customers might say “i don’t completely trust that any document middleman will not lie about my counterparty’s attestation down the road. but i do trust that blockchain B is secure enough to prevent reversals, so this blockchain-based document signing service might be a better product for me.”
  - rubyfan 5y ago
    You suggest Docusign could compromise their core business and therefore the customer problem is lack of trust in Docusign? So how big is such a market of potential customers that don’t trust Docusign to not tamper with the attestation? I’d hypothesize the potential customer segment is very small. Big companies that need Docusign have incentive enough to get it right and typically have rigorous standards to making decisions like this. If lack of trust were an issue with customers, Docusign will have solved that issue already. Trust is not likely an issue for customers. For choosing a Docusign over a Hellosign, price at scale however is an issue. If blockchain solved the cost at scale issue then you’d be on to something but I don’t think it does. Other tech solutions like S3 or R2 probably have a more material impact on a real customer problem like cost at scale than blockchain could hope to. Though I’d guess the cost Docusign and others charge has little to do with underlying data storage or infrastructure costs.
- knurled99 5y ago
  So my friend and I have actually built a blockchain-based esignature app recently, because there are a couple advantages of using blockchain. One is privacy - you don’t actually have to share the document being signed with our application; we never store it and never have access to it. This is because what is actually signed and stored in the blockchain is a hash based on your document. So if there’s anything sensitive in a doc that you’re signing, there’s no risk of a hacker getting into our app and leaking that to the world. Another advantage is that it gives you a publicly accessible way of proving that a digital file existed in a given state on a given day and time - anyone with the document can later go back and validate that the copy they have is the one that existed on that date and time. The value add of the blockchain is that this information is publicly available on a distributed network that uses encryption and requires agreement among the nodes in the network, so it is functionally impossible to go back and tamper with it later. Couple other advantages, but they aren’t necessarily differentiated by virtue of the app being on blockchain - one is speed and ease of use, because there’s no uploading or recreating digital signatures. You just identify a document to sign, ensure both parties have possession of and wish to sign the same thing, and click to sign. The other is the ability to quickly and easily use our simple REST API to add this kind of e-signature and document verification capability into your own app. This is especially useful for anyone who’d like to memorialize some information in the blockchain but doesn’t want to deal with figuring out how to do that directly. Edited to add the name of the app - Indestamp.com
  - rubyfan 5y ago
    Congrats on making something - I wish you luck. I don’t think blockchain adds anything novel to the functionality you describe. The ability to get a cryptographic hash of a document has existed for a very long time. As have signature files that can be published publicly. As has archive.org. I don’t believe the blockchain adds anything here other than maybe longevity and I’m dubious of even that. FYI - when I click ‘Get started’ nothing happens.
    - knurled99 5y ago
      Ah yes, thanks for pointing that out… this is so new that while the app is working great the website is not fully functional yet. There was a working version on the lab version of our site; we just pushed a change to the main site so the button works now. It just takes you to a sign up form. All valid points about hashes being nothing new, etc. We used blockchain because it was a means to accomplish what we feel is a better way of digitally signing documents. We think there’s value in signing docs on the blockchain and that there’s a need for an easy way to do so, largely among people who are doing other things within blockchain. We are not claiming there’s no other way to skin that cat. I understand why you might run the other way if someone’s claiming their app is great because blockchain. But I also don’t think it’s true that any app that uses blockchain technology adds no value because you could’ve used another technology or simply because blockchain.