So I have a question:
I’ve been following @kim’s quick start tutorial, and the validate component claims to be able to verify a certificate using the browser:
The web component allows for in-browser validation of any hosted certificates. Using this component is easy. The validate-certificate component is only intended to be used in low-risk validation scenarios. It is strongly encouraged that anyone without an established, trusted relationship to the certificate’s recipient use an independent verifier installed from a trusted source in order to properly validate the certificate. This prevents someone from writing a fake validator that simply looks like this component, but doesn’t do proper validation.
That’s a lot of power. I and many others on stack overflow have been adamant about the impossibility of validating certificates without having a full copy of the blockchain available to your machine (through USB, SSD, or otherwise). Employers everywhere rejoice.
Now my question is whether its yet possible to issue certs as well, without owning a copy of the blockchain, using this powerful library?
If it isn’t possible, that’s ok, but then the pain point for absolute beginners becomes figuring out how to tinker the issuer tutorial so that it works in conjunction with other “how to download the blockchain” tutorials, so that we can achieve the end goal, which is to issue certificates from one address to another using the commandline. Please let me know!
edit
Oh I see in the GitHub - blockchain-certificates/cert-issuer: Issues Blockcerts using either the Bitcoin or Ethereum blockchain section, it does say:
The Quick Start assumed you are issuing certificates in Bitcoin regtest mode, which doesn’t actually write to a public blockchain. To actually write your transaction, you need to run in testnet (with test coins – not real money) or mainnet (real money)…By default, cert-issuer does not assume you have a bitcoin/ethereum node running locally, and it uses APIs to look up and broadcast transactions. There is API support for both testnet and mainnet chains.
Well done M.I.T and Learning Machine. 
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I may update this post if any questions come to me.