Blockchain and Notarization

BTC Manager ran this terrible headline recently: Be Your own Notary with the new Blockchain Plugin for Microsoft 10. As someone who participates in the e-notary business and who finds blockchain an interesting new technology, I was pretty excited by this headline.

Well, it turns out this headline is pure clickbait and neither Microsoft nor any sort of blockchain based technology will allow you to be your own notary.

First and foremost, notarization isn't, in nearly all jurisdictions, something you can do for yourself. Generally, a notary is not allowed to notarize their own documents, they can only perform the service for someone else. Secondly, most states require a witness for the notarization. The article doesn't even come close to addressing either of these issues, and instead talks in the most general terms about forgery and authenticity.

Proving the authenticity of documents in court is actually easier than this article would have you believe. Documents are presumed authentic unless challenged, and usually such a challenge is based on the other party of the case presenting a competing document. Generally, though, simply walking into court with a piece of paper is all that is necessary, rather than worrying about whether your hashes match.

Sometimes, however, the actual original copy of the document does matter. In those cases, notarization often isn't even the way you prove an original - notarization is the way you prove that the signature is valid.

I'm not exactly sure what the real value is in using blockchain as an e-notary service, but I do think blockchain has a lot of potential for tracking authenticated original documents.