On the one hand we have costly problems of fraud and malicious behavior present in the real world, and on the other we have cryptographic tools. How do we merge these together to create an elegant solution? Unforgeable signatures, timestamped records, and unalterable documents are potential applications of cryptographic tools. However, building appropriate tools means having fluid ideals to recognize the best solutions for a particular problem. Centralization of time-stamping is fine, as long as there are competitors for situations of prolonged down-time. Decentralized blockchains are costly, while cryptographic tools are cheap.