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this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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A nonprofit with multiple synchronized copies of the database and you can get your own copy, synchronize, fork it if you have the space, like a GitLab repository. Remember this is not for secure transactions and to prevent double-spending like a currency. It's just an additive database. You don't need to overkill with a blockchain.
Can you name a nonprofit you'd trust to manage court admissable evidence? How do you resolve differences that can pop up when forks don't agree?
Look, Git exists and image or document registration in an official onine database is Git diffs with less functionality because you can't remove previous commits: you just append new lines. This is a solved problem. If you're trying to solve a double-spend problem, then you need more than that, but it's overkill for your problem.
PS: maybe I'm oversimplifying it, but here's more discussion on this:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46192377/why-is-git-not-considered-a-block-chain
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59509764/is-git-distributed-or-decentralized
I know it's frowned on to modify the history of a remote branch, and I haven't done much research on it because of that, however I'm fairly certain you can modify the history.
So....who hosts the gitlab/GitHub server that you'd trust to never manipulate the git history?
You still haven't answered my question of which nonprofit you'd think everyone would agree with should host such a service.
There are examples like DNS or the Mozilla foundation or all sorts of repos. Due to the receipt system you can verify if the commit history has been tampered with (your image has been removed from the database or edited). For court documents each court could host its own database where checksums are verified periodically, by "oracles".
Are you suggesting that these folks be in charge of maintaining the database? Seems like a very techbro solution. I personally wouldn't trust them to be responsible for all court admissable evidence because that's nowhere near their wheelhouse, but I do know of their positive track record. Good luck convincing the layperson to trust them.
What do you mean? What receipt system? Afaik that's not a gitlab feature.
And who would these oracles be, and how do you resolve differences?
I don't want to only ask questions, without contributing to the discussion myself, so I'll say the following.
I suspect your answer to how to resolve differences would be that the majority of databases that agree would be considered the "truth". How very.... block chain.
And as far as finding a solution that everyone would trust, what if it were truly decentralized, across citizens or even the world, like.... a block chain. No one organization would be in a position to edit anything.
I'm not saying it's the only solution, far from it. I'm just saying that while things like NFTs for art are dumb, there actually are a few applications where the features of a block chain actually fit quite well, and keeping of immutable, objective public records definitely strikes me as one of them.
Everyone uses "oracles" eventually, there is no true "trustless", but you can have systems which are publicly "loud" about being changed, even ethereum needs "oracles" that can be tampered with and which you need to trust, that's why I used the word.
In my books, the system I think you're proposing (distributed storage networks with courthouses being nodes verifying that they all contain the same data by way of majority verification) is veering towards a block chain of sorts, do you think that's the case?
Again - I'm not saying that block chain is the only solution, I'm only saying that the problem at hand is uniquely and cleanly solved by block chain, due to its publicly trusted immutable nature.