3 ms·

Technical differences aside, proofofexistence.com predates the Cornell team's blogpost by a couple of months.[2] I am not surprised that the Cornell team did no

Technical differences aside, proofofexistence.com predates the Cornell team's blogpost by a couple of months.[2] I am not surprised that the Cornell team did not cite the bitcointalk forum post (given the recent frenzy of their Selfish Mining paper, where they neglected to cite a fairly closely related forum post from two years earlier). However, a published paper, CommitCoin,[1] predates both of these by about a year. I don't believe there is any meaningful technical difference among these. [1] Clark, Jeremy, and Aleksander Essex. "CommitCoin: Carbon dating commitments with bitcoin." Financial Cryptography and Data Security. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2012. 390-398. [2] www.proofofexistence.com - Upload a document and have it certified by the Bitcoin blockchain bitcointalk user: maraoz https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=212701.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=212701.0

emin-gun-sirer 13y ago
Timestamping services are not novel and date way back before 2012. The earliest work I know of is from AT&T back in the 80's, where they proposed to publish the hash in the NYT. The idea was so well established that there is even an RFC [1] from 2001. And by the way, virtual-notary.org was online for several months or perhaps even a year before the blog post. But the important differences are actually technical. Virtual Notary is a much more general service, offering to attest to any kind of online factoid. Let's elevate the discussion here -- it doesn't matter who was there first (because the AT&T folks were there two decades before both services), what matters is who offers the most useful service [3]. As for the previous work on selfish mining, see here [2]. [1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3161.txt http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3161.txt [2] http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/09/no-you-dint/ http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/09/no-you-dint/ [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6819835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6819835

emin-gun-sirer 13y ago

Timestamping services are not novel and date way back before 2012. The earliest work I know of is from AT&T back in the 80's, where they proposed to publish the hash in the NYT. The idea was so well established that there is even an RFC [1] from 2001. And by the way, virtual-notary.org was online for several months or perhaps even a year before the blog post. But the important differences are actually technical. Virtual Notary is a much more general service, offering to attest to any kind of online factoid. Let's elevate the discussion here -- it doesn't matter who was there first (because the AT&T folks were there two decades before both services), what matters is who offers the most useful service [3]. As for the previous work on selfish mining, see here [2]. [1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3161.txt http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3161.txt [2] http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/09/no-you-dint/ http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/09/no-you-dint/ [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6819835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6819835