Digital document signing has become a trend and possibly will become a very important part of our digital lives in the near future. There is no need to manually sign a document, where you have to present physically because you can use digital signing services. Even though there are several players in this field, that doesn't stop Deepcloud to provide a new digital signing protocol that will challenge the current centralized digital document signing such as #DocuSign and many others.
This article will discuss the importance of digital document signing, problems & challenges in the current status quo, and how decentralized digital document signing could become a new trend in the market. I hope you enjoy this article!
The Importance of Digital Document Signing
Document signing is essentially important because it represents that the signer accepts/approve/truthfully said what has been presented on the document. In other words, it serves as a proof of authentication/approval of the signer. Without signing, most of those documents are meaningless. And because of this, it is very important to ensure the authenticity of the signature.
Traditionally, in order to ensure that we / people truly sign a document, we have to present physically, sign it in front of the parties involved in the business, and then store the document in a safe vault. This cause a lot of problems, and inflexibility. Imagine if you have to drive 60 miles just to sign a document, or if you have to arrange a meeting just to sign a document. This is why we need digital document signing services where we can sign a document digitally, that removes the inflexibility of the traditional system.
Problems & Challenges in the Status Quo
In the current status quo, exists several digital document signing provider that most of them relies on their own database and program to store the document from the user. Most of the time, a user must buy or subscribe to a package that allows them to issue a document. A regular user should face no problem as most of the time they just need to provide their signature.
Source: Techlicious
The main concern for this architecture is the probability of data leak, or abuse, because (just like any centralized architecture) the documents from the user are stored on their database. Users must trust the provider that they won't abuse any data that they store. This might not be a problem for several users, however, for a very sensitive data/document, this is not a good choice. For example, if a local city government want to use these services to simplify local residents registration or document required activities, they will have to think twice to use it.
So, what's the alternative?
Decentralized Digital Signing Alternative
An alternative for digital document signing is a decentralized digital document signing service. By decentralized, it can mean a lot of things. Either the storage is distributed to several parties, everyone can store the database, the computing resources for document signing is the distributed computing network, and so on. In its simplest, decentralized digital document signing services means that there is no single, central party who control all of the signing process and all things related to it.
Visualization about Deepcloud network. Source: Deepcloud Whitepaper
Deepcloud, one of the projects that we discuss in the previous article aims to create such services. Using these services, local government can use decentralized digital signing services network for their purpose. They can limit, for example, the computer or storage services that will store their document (limited to their citizens), or they can use their citizens computing resources in order to secure the network. There are a lot of things that can be implemented via the decentralized digital document signing services.
Conclusion
Deepcloud, with its DeepSign product, is worth looking for. At this moment, the details are not published, which is why we can't talk about it very thoroughly.
So, in a nutshell, decentralized digital document services is worth waiting for. That's it for now. I'll see you in my next article!
Disclaimer
This article is written by joniboini for a potential rewards from Deepcloud AI bounty program. Readers are encouraged to do their own dilligence about Deepcloud AI by themselves.