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I immediately had the same idea to use a 3rd part to host checksums, surprised they haven't done this. Blockchain makes a lot of sense from the immutability sta
by dumbfounder 9y ago
I immediately had the same idea to use a 3rd part to host checksums, surprised they haven't done this. Blockchain makes a lot of sense from the immutability standpoint, but how would you incentivize people to maintain it? Maybe you can get people to do that for the common good a la wikipedia? Not sure about that. Maybe you get Apache to bake it into their webserver to ask people to opt-in to dedicate 0.1% of resources to the cause?
- simias 9y agoI was thinking about using an existing blockchain such as Bitcoin. Of course then the inconvenient is that archive.org would have to pay a fee every time they submit a new hash. A comment above pointed out that the scheme I described (unsurprisingly) already exists at https://petertodd.org/2016/opentimestamps-announcement https://petertodd.org/2016/opentimestamps-announcement Realistically it might be overkill though, simply setting up some mailing list where anybody can subscribe and be sent the checksum every day or even just publishing it at some URL and letting users scrap it if they want might be sufficient. If we're talking about one checksum every day it's only a few kilobytes every year, it shouldn't be too difficult to convince a few hundred people and organizations around the world to mirror it.
- dumbfounder 9y agoI think you need a checksum for every page, not every day. How would you independently verify the checksum for an entire day?
- rocqua 9y agoMerkle trees. Whomever wants to store a timestamp for some message stores the path from that message to the root of the Merkle tree. Only the root of the merkle tree of each day needs to be published.