Great idea.
Since obituaries only require a few tens of Bytes, maybe less if compressed, storing them in the Bitcoin main chain isn't very costly either.
I don't see how an alternative chain for obituaries will become popular, since people will always regard the main chain as the more trustworthy and durable alternative, and even if the cost of encoding an obituary in Bitcoin transactions amounts to $10 it's still a lot less than a newspaper charges.
Obituaries should be digitally signed, by at least two signatories with a high rank in the deceased person's GPG web of trust. Otherwise the system regards them as hoaxes.
Alternatively, the super-paranoid could use "dead man switch" obituaries.
One potential use of block chain obituaries would be anonymous life insurance.
Topic: Legal announcements, obits (Read 917 times)
I was just having a conversation with a friend about death notices, as he had two of his other friends die in the past three days. He discovered them both in the traditional way, by reading a print newspaper obit section.
(insert classic joke, any day that you can wake up and not find your own obit in the newspaper is a good day)
And then it immediately occurred to me that legal notices are an Internet oversight. Governments and other entities must pay a newspaper to print legal notices because a legal notice must not only be widely distributed, which is trivial on the Internet; but provablely dated.
Any developers have my permission to take this idea and run with it.
Online legal notices, via a parrallel blockchain, paid for by bitcoin wherein the payee's transaction incorporating into the Bitcoin becomes the legal proof of timestamp.
Or something like that.
(insert classic joke, any day that you can wake up and not find your own obit in the newspaper is a good day)
And then it immediately occurred to me that legal notices are an Internet oversight. Governments and other entities must pay a newspaper to print legal notices because a legal notice must not only be widely distributed, which is trivial on the Internet; but provablely dated.
Any developers have my permission to take this idea and run with it.
Online legal notices, via a parrallel blockchain, paid for by bitcoin wherein the payee's transaction incorporating into the Bitcoin becomes the legal proof of timestamp.
Or something like that.
Jump to: