LibreOffice blogs about Blockchain, locks comments after negative user feedback
You would think a message board called &quot;hacker news&quot; would be more open to blue sky thinking. Zero knowledge proofs and a tamper proof ledger of timestamped cryptographic signatures could open up new use cases that are different than relying on central authorities.<p>One idea, document signing: vitalik.eth signs a PDF, everybody can verify the PDF is signed by his private key. He has to broadcast his public key for this, and probably also a content hash of the document so that we can be sure we are verifying the correct PDF. He can broadcast this on Twitter, but that is not a secure and tamper proof ledger, and it is centrally owned, and it&#x27;s not a great storage mechanism for this system to scale to thousands or millions of signatures. LibreOffice could create a new service like keybase.io but that is also centralized and we saw how that went. Another alternative is these messages are broadcast through a public and decentralized ledger.<p>How does this fit with zero knowledge proofs that the blog mentions? There may be signature attestations you can make that you want to be private from the receiver, but made in a way that the receiver can still verify the signature is valid.<p>EDIT: Since I am on a throwaway account, my replies are being throttled. This could be another application of ZKP: create a proof that my main account has significant karma to post, without sacrificing my privacy.