3 ms·

Sorry! I wanted to focus on the technical thing, rather than promoting it. OpenTimestamps is a free, open-source, standard for creating timestamps using (mainl

• londons_explore 6y ago
  If I'm understanding correctly, it's the same as posting the SHA hash of some secret data to twitter to prove you have some data. At a later time, you can reveal the data, and others can see your earlier tweet and be sure you have had the data since the tweet. Except opentimestamps doesn't need to rely on the honesty of twitter.
  • petertodd 6y ago
    > If I'm understanding correctly, it's the same as posting the SHA hash of some secret data to twitter to prove you have some data. Yup! However, it's important to understand that the only thing OpenTimestamps can do is prove data existed prior to some point in time. It can't prove data is unique. Twitter however can. A simple example is if I want to show off how good I'm at predicting which team is going to win some sports championship. With a Twitter hash commitment I can only pick one team; with OpenTimestamps I could just timestamp every single possible prediction in advance. Which in most years would have worked! Though depending on the sports championship, this year that trick wouldn't have been easy because I'd have to have brute-force timestamped a lot of predictions to have a "Cancelled due to COVID-19" timestamp handy. :)