Comparing old & new

The following table helps us to compare the traditional approach with our blockchain powered solution.

	current	digital future
where	at notary's office	remotely from anywhere 👍
what	two copies of paper	digital document - unique hash 👍
identification	government issued 👍	private key
comprehension	notary checks 👍	missing
signing	signing by hand	digital cryptographic signature 👍
validity	notary's stamp on 2 papers	included in a block 👍
witness	notary	decentralized blockchain 👍

As we can see, there are many upsides to the new solution, but we are facing problems as well. Within the scope of this tutorial we won't be able to solve them, but want to address them here.

The biggest challenge to adoption is the recognition by established legal entities. There are already some cases, where data stored in the blockchain is accepted as evidence at legal proceedings. Subject matter experts are working together with governments to legally codify the immutability and auditability of blockchain.

An approach to solve the identification problem is to link digital identity systems to cryptographic key pairs. Governments all over the world are investing into the modernization of their e-governance systems and the European Union is working on standardizing exchange protocols, such as EIDAS.

Checking comprehension will be difficult to outsource to blockchain, but standardization of certain contracts and/or limitation to some pre-defined cases might enable exemptions to this rule.