_sigh_... If you have a good problem to apply blockchain to, just do it. Make a startup.<p>If you want us to come up with problems for you to apply blockchain to, just stop. Find problems and apply whatever solution you need for them.<p>This applies for any single piece of technology one may want to use. The act of reaching out to the community looking for problems and suggesting you want to use hammers is, to me, a sign that company vision is muddy and unclear.<p>[edit] This is in no way an endorsement of blockchain, especially how it's used today.
How about we keep the blockchain as far away from LibreOffice as possible. Those Venn diagrams do not overlap. Maybe instead, put some effort into making the LibreOffice experience and interoperability world-class.<p>This is entirely about credibility smuggling and attempting to force-feed crypto into spaces it has no business in.
Update: LibreOffice has prepended the blog post with a note that they decided to abandon any Blockchain plans and deleted the tweet on <a href="https://twitter.com/LibreOffice/status/1592462972575952898" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/LibreOffice/status/1592462972575952898</a>.
I don't know, talking about blockchain became such an extreme topic that one can't just talk about it, even if it's a note that "We had a chat with Eth Foundation" and people are coming with foaming mouth. The article does not mention that they are thinking about _crypto_ but _blockchain_, which, seems like not a lot of people know about, does not 100% means "im going to release a shitcoin, haha, rugpull".<p>It's insane.
Instead of this, it will help if the doc foundation works on providing mobile-friendly and also online libreoffice via the doc foundation and not by third party.
> possible ways for people to combine LibreOffice with blockchain technologies. (We’re not talking about putting blockchain into LibreOffice!)<p>anyone care to explain to me the difference here?
You would think a message board called "hacker news" 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'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.