Bitcoin: The Trust Anchor in a Sea of Blockchainshttp://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-the-trust-anchor-in-a-sea-of-blockchains/Brian Deery, chief scientist at Factom, wrote an excellent history of timestamping, in which he argues that a secure timestamped record wasnt feasible before the existence of secure digital value.
Deery writes:
"There needed to be a way to entice people to brute force hash chains. A good way of doing that would be to give them money."
Its worth noting that anchoring does not automatically make a service's data as immutable as bitcoin's data, but it does provide a strong guarantee that any tampering will be evident. A recommended best practice for these services is to provide easy-to-use tools for users to verify the anchors against the state of the system.
Why is this so important? I think Paul Snow, CEO of Factom, stated it best:
"One of the things about immutable ledgers is they tend to be honest because it's very hard to know today what lie I want to tell tomorrow. And if the lie has to be in the ledger and I dont know what the lie is going to be until tomorrow then basically my ability to lie is dramatically reduced."
