Author: Peter Todd 2022-06-14 11:12:14
Published on: 2022-06-14T11:12:14+00:00
In an email conversation, Jeremy Rubin has proposed a model for timestamping services that he believes is necessary for reliability. However, Peter Todd argues that the linearization approach is flawed and timestamps only prove the existence of a message prior to a certain time. The OpenTimestamps service uses commitment operations on an initial message to create a message known to have been created at some point in time, such as a Bitcoin block header, but none of the technical details of this process are relevant to the validity of the proof. Todd suggests that random beacons provide a solution for dual-sided bounds on when messages were created and can be used with trusted alternatives like the NIST random beacon or Roughtime. He also notes that OpenTimestamps could offer a trustless relative random beacon service using per-second commitments in a merkle mountain range, but involving transactions in any random beacon approach would be pointless.
Updated on: 2023-06-03T09:03:16.817838+00:00