Understanding how Blockcerts work

Hello Chris,

Thanks for your answers again! You made your points clearly.

However I am still having a lot of trouble grasping the authentication process itself. This is what I have:

JSON Certificate -> Digital Signature process [Calculate certificate hash using SHA256 for instance -> Encrypt the hash with issuer private key] -> publish this digitally signed certificate on the blockchain transaction.

This way, verifier would use issuer’s public key to decrypt digitally signed certificate (obtained from blockchain transaction) and use this result to compare with calculated hash of certificate I showed to verifier.

Am I missing one hash operation? Do I have to hash the digitally signed certificate again before publishing it on the blockchain?

Apologies in advance if I am being inconvenient, just having a hard time grasping all the concepts!