Author: Peter Todd 2022-06-14 15:22:21
Published on: 2022-06-14T15:22:21+00:00
In an email sent to bitcoin-dev, a victim of abuse shared their opinion on the limitations of OpenTimestamps (OTS) in proving the timing and uniqueness of documents. While OTS can prove the longness of duration of a document, it cannot prove its shortness or that an earlier work was not published. This is because OTS hashes each document with private material that must be separately publicized, allowing for unpublished private material to be an earlier equivalent to a public proof. The victim referred to this as "designed to be broken" since it allows people to rewrite history by republishing other people's documents under different contexts. According to the website of Peter Todd, one of the developers of OTS, the timestamps have significant limitations in what they can prove. However, they are also exceptionally scalable and essentially free to use, making them easier to add to existing processes and systems such as Git repositories. Schemes that prove uniqueness require much more engineering and redesign work to accomplish anything.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T22:13:16.098212+00:00