Timestamping with blockchain — how does it work in practice?

CryptoCurrency
3 min readApr 1, 2020

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Since the late ’70s, digital signatures have been successfully used to provide authentication, along with integrity and non-repudiation of a message and its source. Algorithms like DSA, PKCS #1 (RSA), ECDSA and others have been used or are still in use in digital signature solutions like Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and Adobe Sign, for example.

The basics of its mechanism

The basic idea is kind of simple: create a unique and universal fingerprint for every piece of content, based on simple inputs such as a title, the content itself and the date. This results in a unique fingerprint, let’s call it a hash. If one of the inputs changes, then the hash changes. With our unique fingerprint on-chain, we can irrevocably prove that our piece of content existed at the moment of the blockchain transaction.

You need to timestamp every iteration of your content and add it to the blockchain; this way, you can prove the existence of the new iteration. Your old timestamp won’t become invalid, but it’s only valid for the previous iteration of your content. No matter if you keep each revision of a specific content public or just its fingerprint — you can, each time, prove the existence, development, and ownership of your publications.

Technical aspects

Timestamps based in blockchain technology work differently than the ones used in digital signatures. Bitcoin transactions are included in blocks being generated in 10-minute (average) periods. The blockchain’s accuracy is in the range of several minutes (it may improve in future Bitcoin protocol revisions, or with new layers on top of it) — for signing contracts a date is more than enough.

Digital signatures authenticate the source of a message and guarantee its integrity. There is a danger, though if newer signatures are replaced with older, still valid ones; however, Blockchain’s distributed consensus solves this with a public repository where we can all agree on latest signatures (a shared single source of truth). In fact, and more important, we can be sure that we are all seeing the same signatures, and no one can change them.

Service providers of blockchain timestamps

Although this method of timestamping is not in the frontlines (at least not yet), there are service providers that offer their expertise in this specific field of blockchain application. Here are some of those service providers and their offers in this segment of the market:

  • Blocknotary — BlockNotary Timestamp notarizes any media file, and generates publicly verifiable receipt of its origin, date, authenticity, and integrity. BlockNotary does this without exposing the files’ contents. Its uses include digital attribution, proof of existence, prior knowledge, integrity, and authenticity. Timestamp creates 100% distributed proofs using OTS (OpenTimestamps), IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) and public Bitcoin or Ethereum blockchains. Generated receipts are independently verifiable and machine-readable.
  • OriginStamp.org — it’s a scientific & non-commercial trusted timestamping service for digital content. You can use our service anonymously and free of charge to prove that you were in possession of information or a file, e.g., PDF, image, video, at a specific time. OriginStamp is a web-based, trusted timestamping service that uses the decentralized blockchain to store anonymous, tamper-proof time stamps for any digital content, offering their services through a browser and a smartphone application as well.
  • OpenTimestamps — they aim to provide a standard format or blockchain timestamping, offering code repositories, mailing lists and memberships.
  • Stempd.io — this service uses public blockchains to timestamp different files with indelible proof. They offer their services through a WordPress plugin, Chrome extension and desktop application for MacOS, Linux and Windows as well.

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CryptoCurrency
CryptoCurrency

Written by CryptoCurrency

Cryptocurrency market data overview and research platform.

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