Just because I feel like arguing a bit, here goes:
>- In your scenario you're not decentralized, you have a clear authority: the news agency
Only due to current technical limitations. Shift to Blockchain, get distributed news agencies, with reporters[1] residing all over the world. Think of the time and costs saved by not having to send reporter out of a central office
>- The news agency can broadcast a signed merkle tree of the articles it publishes alongside the normal newspaper/news program etc... For instance through their website.
Doesn't help a bit, given how they have total control over the content of the website, they could just as easily swap out the merkele root and claim it is the original one. Blockchain denies them this sleight of hand.
>- Anybody who cares about it could maintain a copy of this signed tree locally.
...and there's a well known tool for distributing that in a verified & timestamped format - Blockchain.
>- If the news agency censors or edits an article anybody with a copy of the original tree can prove it by showing that their tree has a valid signature from the news agency and yet the hashes don't match.
Introduces a 'he-said, she-said' problem. Which the Blockchain neatly avoids.
[1] possibly with a lot more "citizen journalists" who do the reporting as a side activity, rather than mostly plain old full-time journalists.
>Shift to Blockchain, get distributed news agencies, with reporters
You'll have to break that one down for me. Can the blockchain also cure male pattern baldness? Asking for a friend.
>and there's a well known tool for distributing that in a verified & timestamped format - Blockchain.
News agencies typically already have a way to distribute information since that's literally their job. Even if they don't they could just tweet it or whatever. That's not really a problem.
>Introduces a 'he-said, she-said' problem. Which the Blockchain neatly avoids.
No it doesn't, if you can provide a valid signature from the "News Org" public key that doesn't match the article's checksum then it proves that "News Org" at
some point signed conflicting data, proving that something has been tempered with. It doesn't matter if the person pointing that out is some anonymous user on
8chan, as long as the signature is valid it can only mean that the news organization did something shady or that their key got compromised.
That's the whole principle behind public key cryptography. I signed this comment before posting it, which means that if tomorrow I delete this message and you
kept a copy you could show that I in fact authored it (or at least endorsed it somehow): https://pastebin.com/XKnQSFew
> Shift to Blockchain, get distributed news agencies, with reporters[1] residing all over the world
The associated press didn't seem to need a blockchain to have reporters scattered across the world. They simply recruited reporters that lived across the world.
What you're talking about sounds more like twitter or facebook where you have "reporters" (aka users) write poorly written updates from around the world.
> Doesn't help a bit, given how they have total control over the content of the website, they could just as easily swap out the merkele root and claim it is the original one
If you've ever force pushed to a git repo, you know why this is hard. Regardless, blockchain doesn't solve this, per the next point.
> Introduces a 'he-said, she-said' problem. Which the Blockchain neatly avoids.
The blockchain avoids it by insisting whoever spent the most energy is the source of truth.
Let's say an attacker wishes to insist the correct hash is Y, not X, and thus paint the news agency as a liar for having a story up with hash X.
All that person has to do is use more energy to publish a longer blockchain that includes Y... and the news agency doesn't really have an incentive to spend a lot of energy protecting the blockchain probably, so it won't be hard.
The incentive of mining makes sense for money. It doesn't make much sense for this case.
> and there's a well known tool for distributing that in a verified & timestamped format - Blockchain.
I'd go with "git", "rsync", "ftp", or "bittorrent" as well known tools for distributing some files, whether they're timestamped or not.
>- In your scenario you're not decentralized, you have a clear authority: the news agency Only due to current technical limitations. Shift to Blockchain, get distributed news agencies, with reporters[1] residing all over the world. Think of the time and costs saved by not having to send reporter out of a central office
>- The news agency can broadcast a signed merkle tree of the articles it publishes alongside the normal newspaper/news program etc... For instance through their website. Doesn't help a bit, given how they have total control over the content of the website, they could just as easily swap out the merkele root and claim it is the original one. Blockchain denies them this sleight of hand.
>- Anybody who cares about it could maintain a copy of this signed tree locally. ...and there's a well known tool for distributing that in a verified & timestamped format - Blockchain.
>- If the news agency censors or edits an article anybody with a copy of the original tree can prove it by showing that their tree has a valid signature from the news agency and yet the hashes don't match. Introduces a 'he-said, she-said' problem. Which the Blockchain neatly avoids.
[1] possibly with a lot more "citizen journalists" who do the reporting as a side activity, rather than mostly plain old full-time journalists.