Author: Peter Todd 2019-09-26 09:08:01
Published on: 2019-09-26T09:08:01+00:00
Konstantin Ketterer, a recent high school graduate, has proposed a solution for timestamping data using Bitcoin's blockchain. The proposed system involves sending a hash of the message to a timestamping server, which calculates Pedersen commit and builds a merkle tree with other commits. Then, a valid transaction containing the merkle root is published to the Bitcoin blockchain. After a certain number of blocks, the user can confirm that the commitment is part of the blockchain. To prove payment, a lightning payment with C - x*H = r*G as the payment point is sent to the timestamping server. This scheme shifts the risk of timestamping service from the buyer to the seller, who now has to pay the on-chain transaction fee upfront.However, the need for such a paid service seems unnecessary since scalable timestamping services like OpenTimestamps already exist. OpenTimestamps uses giant merkle trees built every second in a scalable way to amortize the cost of BTC transactions across the entire world's timestamps, thus eliminating the need to charge for timestamps. Furthermore, Andrew Poelstra has created an open pull request to add secp256k1 commitments to OpenTimestamps, which could be useful in implementing Konstantin's proposed system.
Updated on: 2023-06-02T20:18:55.022991+00:00