Dont wanna be annoying, but I found this comment under the one of Factom videos.
"Here's another easier way to secure the integrity of 29,000 books.
Create a torrent for each book, or a torrent that contains all the books, keep the .torrent, you'll have SHA1 hashes for each torrent, and you'll have the file pieces hashed as well. A .torrent file is a Factum used to validate the integrity of files transfered.
Then grab the .torrent hash and put it into a Bitcoin transaction.
You can create torrents of just about any data source, and add those torrent infohashes to the Bitcoin blockchain.
I still don't see why Factum is needed."
Can someone elaborate? Im not techie, but I guess simple solutions always win.
Bittorrent does everything Factom does
and allows for efficient filesharing, and is much more distributed/resilient
I regularly backup archives of ebooks and music by creating torrents of them and using that to distribute data + hashes across lots of storage
Proof of Existence is the proof of the positive, which can certainly be done in this fashion. The problem is that it doesn't prove the negative. Factom allows you to create a Factom Chain where you can not only prove the existence of everything in that chain, but prove no other entries are in the chain.
Peter Todd is working on a project called Proof Chains (
https://github.com/proofchains) that allows you to create a chain of entries in Bitcoin that duplicates Factom's features. The downside is that your data 1) is directly in the Bitcoin blockchain, 2) requires Bitcoin's transaction fees (more expensive), 3) is subject to censorship (by those that don't like this stuff in Bitcoin), 4) requires users to hold the whole Blockchain for their proofs, 5) is subject to Bitcoin confirmation times, 6) requires users to manage and hold Bitcoin wallets to write their data, and 7) has no means to incentivize the development and support of the code.
Factom seeks to address these and other issues. It turns out that building a censorship resistant layer over bitcoin to write arbitrary data is just harder than it looks.