Hi Bryan,
Thank you again for sending this. I reviewed the blog post and paper, and it would be interesting to experiment with SkipChain as a peer-to-peer or offline verifier. Of course the ongoing cost of maintaining the Chainiac instances would be a concern for Blockcerts deployments in general, but we are very interested in exploring options for offline verification.
On that topic, your blog post touched on some important gaps we had in our verification documentation – i.e the SPOF introduced by relying exclusively on one blockchain explorer – so I added some clarification and will review our docs generally to make sure this is clear. (I thought we addressed this, and I possibly introduced this when splitting out blockcerts.org docs among github repos ~6 months ago.)
All - if anyone in the Blockcerts community could help drive such an effort this would be very helpful (note that if you are targeting offline verification, this would be a really good way to kickstart such investigations).
Thanks again Bryan, and I look forward to iterating on this more.
–Kim