Sign legal documents (almost Free) using BlockSignit.com! Don’t want to? Here’s the review!:
Great. So I decided to take this service for a test drive for reviews’ sake. It was honestly very simple as they had intended. I had to upload a PDF that could be 50 MB or smaller and was instructed to create an account which required an email address and password. Their idea is centralized and it seems to keep a database of the uploaded document along with a publicly available downloadable copy (available via a link) – its quickly and easily retrievable and it allows for distributed copies of easily signed documents.
My beefs with it are that you must use a throwaway email address in order to not totally compromise your privacy as these documents linked are now viewable to anyone across the web. That means this is a NO-GO for things like DMV applications, life insurance payment disbursements, payment remittance agreements, etc. I do see certain niche markets where this may work such as for specific user seals of approval or of verification of Terms and conditions read, I suppose. For instance, if I were certified with the Institute of electronics and electical engineers (IEEE) and wanted a quick way to share this certification, I could sign my copy as I did here: https://blocksignit.com/v/BlNSM3HTFADczvxM
After a friendly reply from one of the blocksign developers, I have come to learn and confirmed that the documents only appear to be visible to anyone because I’m logged into the account itself. The document itself confirms as a verified (but hidden) document:
I also decided to try out the mode of sending a document to multiple persons for signature gathering purposes and notice immediately that I must identify subsequent signers by email address and name – this means that the publicly facing block chain will be a target for would-be spammers and email scrapers alike. Interestingly, if I have requested multiple people to sign a document, it will not be released for public view until all persons have signed the document – that COULD work to an advantage in some situations, but more likely it will work against many in the vast majority of use cases.
This is certainly no advantage compared to Docusign, but I would imagine that the centralized location for past signed documents does make it easy to store and retrieve important past items on the cloud (so long as you securely keep the links separate from your email or dropbox or other attack vectors that could be used to gain unwanted access to your files and by proxy, your identity.)
In conclusion, I think this concept is cool if you have something that must be publicly facing and acknowledged but that its not practical to use for most applications currently.
Till next time,
Frankenmint
4 thoughts on “BlockSign Review”
Krisoft
(August 29, 2014 - 1:04 pm)Hi Frankenmint,
I’m krisoft one of the developers of BlockSign. Thank you for your review.
There are a few inaccuracies. The document is not available to the public. You might only see it because you are logged in into the service, and you are the original uploader and signer. You can check this by going to your verification link, the one you have posted in the article, after logging out, or from an incognito window.
Your email address likewise remains private, tough you can use a throwaway email address if that’s what you would like to do.
The only thing which is public about your document is it’s hash. That’s what gets published into the bitcoin blockchain.
The other thing is, that while we certainly keep a centralized record of the documents, the signatures live on the bitcoin blockchain.
This let you, or anyone who you share the signed document with, a way to verify it’s authenticity. Therefore the storage is actually distributed.
You can read more about the protocol here: http://blog.blocksignit.com/post/96006165340/how-blocksign-works
or the actual specification here: https://github.com/blocksign/blocksign
Our goal is to be as transparent as possible, and clearly we have to work on communicating these topics more articulately. Thank you for pointing out these issues.
Also thank you for your review again, and hope this clears up some things.
Frankenmint
(August 29, 2014 - 2:27 pm)It does. Thank you very much for your input – I will update my review to reflect this accordingly as I’ve confirmed the documents are hidden as you mention with me being logged out.
flashwins
(July 6, 2017 - 5:04 pm)There is no contact information on your site, and no pricing.
frankenmint
(July 7, 2017 - 6:25 pm)I reset my password and logged back into this three years later to let you know:
1) still free [which indicates to me this idea never reached critical Mass of enough users to achieve profitability (aka changetip)
2) it is overkill to demand a contact us page – there is an email address to find on that website so if you really needed, you could reach them. I’m sure they have social media channels so they’re reachable there too conceivably. (read: https://twitter.com/basno)
3) Thanks for dropping by 😀 this place is a bit dusty these days becasue I’m pretty busy with client projects…but I still love meeting other crypto-peoples. Crypto runneth deep fam.