On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 02:39:30PM +0200, S. Matthew English wrote: > here's an article I wrote recently about timestamping in bitcoin: > > https://cointelegraph.com/news/timestamp-hacking-debunking-the-myth-of-precision-timestamps I think your article both misunderstands and overstates the problem. Specifically: > You might have heard that one of the properties a Blockchain possesses is the > ability to “prove certain data exists at a certain moment of time” or that it > somehow “provides proof that some data existed at a specific time”. The > problem with these claims is that they are demonstrably false. Suppose I claim that as of Jan 1st, 2016, 12:01am - a specific time t - the following string existed: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" As my evidence, I provide Bitcoin block 0, and the hundreds of thousands of blocks that follow it. Is that claim false? I mean, maybe all the Bitcoin miners had their clocks wrong for seven consecutive years. Or maybe you're looking at a chain that someone made with tens of millions of dollars worth of electricity. But I can make those kinds of claims of *any* timestamping solution, so that's not terribly interesting. Sure, you can't naively say that a Bitcoin block header timestamp means that data existed as of the exact time in the block. But you have exceptionally high assurance that the header existed as of that date + a month, certainely as good if not better assurance than you can get by any traditional means like publishing notices in news papers. Saying otherwise - particularly saying that Chainpoint's claims are "demonstratable false" is fear-mongering; a more useful and accurate article would accurately explain the limitations of the tech and why it's non-trivial to prove things to within more than a day or so. Chainpoint may in fact be guilty of that false precision - I know my OpenTimestamps Client is, and I mention it in the "Known Issues" section of its README(1), with a link to further discussion on the topic - but let's not fall into the trap of making our debunking's themselves hype. 1) It's a tricky problem to fix, because just rounding off to the nearest day risks people getting confused by the interactions of timezone conversions across the international date line. -- https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.orgReceived on Friday, 30 September 2016 00:36:29 UTC
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