Open Timestamps: Leveraging Bitcoin's Security For All Data
Speakers: Sjors Provoost, Aaron van Wirdum
Date: November 5, 2020
Transcript By: chippsmith via review.btctranscripts.com
Tags: Proof systems
Media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUFNqD3DWWQ
Introduction
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:00:07
Live from Utrecht, this is Van Wirdum Sjorsnado.
Sjors Provoost: 00:00:10
Hello!
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:00:11
Hey Sjors.
Sjors Provoost: 00:00:12
What’s up?
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:00:13
Sjors, today we are going to discuss at length in depth the American political situation.
Sjors Provoost: 00:00:19
That’s right. We’re going to explain everything and we’re going to tell you who to vote for, even though this will be released after the election.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:00:26
This is our election special that’s going to be published three days after the election. There was something in the news this week which is mildly, slightly relevant to Bitcoin, and we thought it would be fun to dedicate an episode to it.
Sjors Provoost: 00:00:43
Yep, exactly.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:00:44
We’re not actually going to discuss the politics of the situation.
Sjors Provoost: 00:00:48
I believe the listeners understand that.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:00:50
What we’re going to discuss is OpenTimestamps.
Sjors Provoost: 00:00:53
Yes.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:00:53
Right? And we’ll get to the reason why it’s relevant later. Or do you want to get into that now?
Sjors Provoost: 00:00:58
Well, we can say that something was timestamped. That was at least mentioned in the news.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:01:04
So it’s these emails by Hunter Biden, or he received emails. That’s actually the story. Through timestamps, we can be sure that these emails were in fact sent a couple years ago and they were signed with Google’s keys.
Sjors Provoost: 00:01:20
Exactly. Was that term again? Yeah, they were sent between two Gmail addresses and Google signs email. So we know that Google signed that email and if they don’t lie about the timestamps, which I don’t think Google does, we know those emails are real. What they mean is a different question, but we know they’re real.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:01:36
Yes, and thanks to OpenTimestamps, we know that the emails were really sent.
Sjors Provoost: 00:01:40
Actually, thanks to OpenTimestamps, we know less than that, but we can get into that.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:01:45
Okay, let’s get into OpenTimestamps then.
Open Timestamps
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:01:47
So OpenTimestamps, it’s a project by Peter Todd, former Bitcoin Core contributor.
Sjors Provoost: 00:01:52
He likes to call himself a former Bitcoin Core contributor.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:01:56
Yes, and applied cryptographer consultant. That’s what he calls himself. So do you want to explain what it is? Open timestamps?
Sjors Provoost: 00:02:05
Well it’s basically a way to prove that a given document existed before a certain time.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:02:13
Yeah, before or at a certain time I guess.
Sjors Provoost: 00:02:18
If you add one second then you can make it before.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:02:19
Sure, exactly. Sure, fair enough.
Sjors Provoost: 00:02:21
But the idea is you use the Bitcoin blockchain for this because Bitcoin blocks, we know when they were created, roughly, not to the second, but we know roughly when they were created. And so if the Bitcoin blockchain points to a document, and I say points to in quotes, that means that document must have existed before that part of the blockchain was created. And that’s kind of what OpenTimestamp leverages. Of course, we don’t actually put documents in the blockchain, that would be bad. We put timestamps of the documents in the blockchain. And these timestamps are a hash of the document, or they are a hash of multiple documents.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:02:59
There are actual documents in the blockchain, aren’t there?
Sjors Provoost: 00:03:02
That’s correct. So that’s the worst way you can do this. You can put the actual document in the blockchain and then you can prove that that document existed very long ago and some people were doing that back in 2011.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:03:16
Yeah, for example, the Bitcoin white paper is in the blockchain, right?
Sjors Provoost: 00:03:20
It could be.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:03:21
I think so. But anyway, so there’s a better way of doing this.
Sjors Provoost: 00:03:24
Yes, because a document can be hashed.
What Is a Hash
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:03:28
Yes, so what’s a hash? Is that too much for our audience? Do they already understand that you think?
Sjors Provoost: 00:03:36
No, it’s good to remind people.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:03:37
Okay, let’s get it. What is a hash?
Sjors Provoost: 00:03:39
We can teach them something. The Dutch word for hash is verhospeling. Not that anyone would ever use that word. But it is basically a mangled version of the document.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:03:48
Why did you mention that?
Sjors Provoost: 00:03:50
Because we want to educate our users.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:03:52
We want to teach them Dutch?
Sjors Provoost: 00:03:53
Yes.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:03:54
For the hospital. You taught me something, I didn’t know that.
Sjors Provoost: 00:03:57
Well, yeah, because nobody would use that.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:03:59
Right.
Sjors Provoost: 00:04:00
So the idea is that you take any given text and you mangle it in a way that you get a number, it looks like a bunch of letters, but it’s just a big number.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:04:11
It’s a hexadecimal number, right?
Sjors Provoost: 00:04:14
Well a number is a number but you can write a number as a hexadecimal.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:04:17
Exactly.
Sjors Provoost: 00:04:17
So the key there is that if you change one letter in the text, the hash changes. And so a good hash function is something that takes any text and produces a unique number and does not collide. So you cannot come up with two different tags that produce the same number. Now that’s of course impossible to actually prove, but the wizards came up with, for example, SHA-256, and so far it seems to work. And the nice thing is the Bitcoin blockchain keeps producing blocks, and there’s a pretty big incentive to find a duplicate. So if there is a vulnerability in SHA256 where you could change the contents of a block and still have the same proof of work, That would be bad, but we’ll find out soon enough.
Benefits of a Hash
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:05:03
Yeah, so I guess the benefits of a hash I would describe as if you have a hash of a document and you have the document, then you can prove that the hash of the document is in fact the hash of the document, because every time you hash the document, the same hash comes out.
Sjors Provoost: 00:05:19
That’s right.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:05:20
And the other benefit is that a hash is very small compared to the document.
Sjors Provoost: 00:05:24
That’s also right.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:05:24
Or at least it can be very small. So you can have an entire book, and you produce a hash of it, then you just have one string of numbers.
Sjors Provoost: 00:05:32
Exactly.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:05:33
So now you can prove that the book is the same thing as the hash.
Sjors Provoost: 00:05:37
Yeah, and this can be useful for very practical stuff like if you have optical character recognition, so you’re scanning a book and you want to make sure that the scan is correct, or maybe you have a checksum, which is also a hash.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:05:50
Right. Okay. So that’s what a hash is.
Sjors Provoost: 00:05:52
Yes.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:05:52
Do we cover hashes? I think so.
Merkle Tree
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:05:55
Now, something we discussed last week is a Merkle tree. How about I explain the Merkle tree this time?
Sjors Provoost: 00:06:01
Sounds good. Go ahead.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:06:01
And then people can tell us who did a better job.
Sjors Provoost: 00:06:04
All right.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:06:04
Okay, so we’re hashing documents. We just explained how we’re hashing documents. Let’s say we have two documents. Each of them we turn into a hash. So now we have two hashes. Now we take the two hashes and we combine these and turn them into a new hash. So now we have one hash again. Now we have two more documents. We hash these documents as well. We have two hashes. These two hashes we hash again. So now in total we still have two hashes. We hash these hashes together and now once again we have one hash.
Sjors Provoost: 00:06:40
One hash that represents all these four documents.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:06:42
Yes, one hash that includes all four.
Sjors Provoost: 00:06:44
And This looks like a pyramid, but we call it a tree.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:06:49
Yes, it’s a reverse tree. It’s a pyramid. Yeah, you’re right. That’s what a Merkle tree is.
Sjors Provoost: 00:06:54
So why do we care about Merkle trees?
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:06:56
The nice thing about the Merkle tree is that if you have one of the documents that’s included in the Merkle tree, you should be able to prove that it is in the Merkle tree to someone who only has the Merkle hash, which was the last hash we ended up with.
Sjors Provoost: 00:07:14
Exactly. And they also don’t need to know every document in the Merkle tree. So you can reveal one document in the Merkle tree.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:07:21
Right.
Sjors Provoost: 00:07:22
By revealing the right hashes. Basically one at every level of the tree.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:07:26
Yes, which is called a Merkle proof.
Sjors Provoost: 00:07:33
So why do we care about this? Instead of putting the whole document inside the blockchain in the transaction, we can put a hash of a document in a transaction.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:07:42
Right, which is much more compact, much smaller, and therefore requires less block space and less fees.
Sjors Provoost: 00:07:47
Exactly.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:07:47
So that’s better.
Sjors Provoost: 00:07:48
And there’s a nice way to do that.
This is called OP_RETURN, which we discussed in a previous episode.
It basically tells the node everything after this, you can ignore.
You don’t have to put this in your UTXO set, which we talked about last episode, takes up RAM.
So you write OP_RETURN in the destination of your payment, and then it’s followed by the hash.
And then some other software will have to interpret that.
But it’s still a bit inefficient, right?
And that’s why we’re talking about this Merkle tree.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:08:14
Yeah, you don’t want to have to create a transaction for each document you want to include in a blockchain because there’s a better way and that’s including the Merkle root.
I’m confused about terms can you hear?
Sjors Provoost: 00:08:26
So the Merkle root is the top of the tree yes or the top of the roots or the bottom of the upside down tree, depending on how you want to look at it. And the Merkle proof is a way to say that this given document actually is part of that tree without having to reveal the entire tree, but just bits of the tree. So how do you use this in practice is the question because you might just have one document that you want to timestamp but you don’t want to create a transaction for that, but what if people could come together and have a whole bunch of documents maybe once a day or once an hour, timestamped. And that is where the calendar server comes out. So this is a super centralized solution, but that doesn’t really matter. And we’ll explain why that doesn’t matter.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:09:14
It’s a server run by Peter Todd in this case, right?
Sjors Provoost: 00:09:17
It could be, we don’t know, but that’s what he says.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:09:19
I trust Peter, don’t you? I trust Peter to run this server.
Sjors Provoost: 00:09:24
We don’t have to. Okay, so what this calendar server does is basically everybody keeps sending documents to it, or actually hashes of documents to it, of course, not the actual document, that would be bad, and the server basically waits one second, and then tells you at the end of that second, if you were the only hash or if there were other people who submitted something in that second, and it gives you a hash back. And you then need to call that server again a while later to say has this thing been included in the block yet? Because every couple hours, it will take all these hashes and make a Merkle tree out of that and put that on the blockchain inside a transaction.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:10:05
So what the server is returning to you immediately is a hash of the document itself?
Sjors Provoost: 00:10:10
I think the server immediately returns either a timestamp or maybe the hash of every other document it perceived. No, probably, I guess a timestamp. I haven’t looked at the implementation, but the idea is that it groups everybody into seconds, so you never have to wait for more than a second. And then at some point multiple seconds worth of documents are put into a single transaction, which is confirmed in a chain. And then the server will actually give you the whole chain of evidence you need to go from the document you submitted to that transaction and the block.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:10:45
Okay, so that last part doesn’t happen immediately. That last part telling you where to find it in the tree, that only happens when it’s included in a transaction.
Sjors Provoost: 00:10:53
Well, it has to, right? And included in a block, because you don’t know what block it’s going to be in when you make the transaction. But you don’t even know what the transaction is going to look like because there’s more documents coming in. So the hash keeps changing. The hash that goes into the transaction keeps changing as new documents go to this calendar server. But eventually, at some point, everything it’s got so far goes into a transaction, it gets confirmed, and now it has that proof. So this is where you temporarily have to trust it. But you can see if it’s not doing what it’s supposed to do. It could just decide to throw away your document and never include it. But once it has done that, you don’t need it anymore, because you get all the evidence yourself and you can keep it. And if they somehow censor you, then you just run your own server.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:11:42
Okay, so if I understand correctly, Everyone’s sending in documents they want to have hashed, or do they send in the hashes themselves?
Sjors Provoost: 00:11:49
They send in the hashes.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:11:50
Okay, so everyone sends in hashes of documents they want to have timestamped. Once a second, Peter Todd returns, or well, the calendar server, whoever operates it, returns either a hash of the document, if there was only one document that second. Or no, in that case, what do you get back because you’re already sending in a hash?
Sjors Provoost: 00:12:11
I guess it’ll just give you the hash back. I haven’t read the exact code, but this is probably how it roughly works.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:12:17
Yeah, it’s a bit of an implementation detail anyway. So you send in the hash of the document you want to have timestamped. Once a second, a hash is returned, which is either that hash, or if multiple people send in documents, or if there were multiple hashes of documents sent in the same second, then a Merkle root is returned plus a Merkle path, which lets you find your hash in the tree. It’s like a miniature tree for once a second. Every second, there’s a miniature tree.
Sjors Provoost: 00:12:51
And this just prevents you from flooding the server with millions of hashes and it having to hold on to that for years. Now, whatever you throw at it in one second, it can forget after one second.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:13:02
Right. Now, all of these miniature trees, to call them that, these are all sort of accumulated and turned into a new Merkle tree. And the Merkle root of that tree is once a while included in a Bitcoin transaction. At that point, all of the documents are basically time-stamped in the Bitcoin blockchain.
Sjors Provoost: 00:13:22
Yes, but you still don’t have the proof.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:13:24
Yes, and that proof is also sent to you by the server.
Sjors Provoost: 00:13:27
No, no, no. The server, you know, it’s not, don’t call us, we call you. It’s the opposite. You have to call the server. So you basically, every now and then, I think there’s a way that you can just wait for it if you have a patient computer, but you can also pull it later and say, hey, do you have the full proof of me now? And at that point, it will give you everything you need.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:13:47
Right, okay.
Sjors Provoost: 00:13:48
So which to go back is basically you started your document that you gave the hash. And then the whatever hashes of all the documents in that one second, and then whatever transaction it comes in, and then where that is in the block. That’s pretty much the proof.
How to Prove a Document has Been Timestamped
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:14:06
All right, so now we’ve included a document or the hash of a document in the Bitcoin blockchain through this miracle trick. Now we want to prove to someone later on, it’s a year later, we want to prove to someone, that a year ago, we included this hash into the Bitcoin blockchain. How do we do that? How do we prove it?
Sjors Provoost: 00:14:24
So first you give that person the actual document, and then you give them this OTS file, which contains the proof. Basically all these these Merkle proofs that we stored before.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:14:36
Right and then what does that person do with that?
Sjors Provoost: 00:14:39
They run a command called ots verify which basically checks the proof and it checks whether all the hashes are what they say they should be.
And then it checks against your own node whether the transaction is included in the blockchain.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:14:52
So that requires them to have the OpenTimestamp software, right?
Sjors Provoost: 00:14:56
That’s right.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:14:56
And the OpenTimestamp software uses the Bitcoin blockchain that you have on your node to check if it’s really in there.
Sjors Provoost: 00:15:02
Exactly. And so it does not need any of these calendar services. So these are just necessary to store proof, but they can disappear off the face of the earth as long as you keep the file with the proof.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:15:12
Right. So now in recent weeks we discussed all sorts of pruning tricks, these kinds of things. What if you’re running a pruned node? Can you still check the blockchain somehow?
Sjors Provoost: 00:15:22
Yes, because the nice thing is that you can prove that a transaction exists in a block without keeping the whole block. You can provide a Merkle proof that the transaction actually occurs in the block. And therefore the only thing you need is the block header. And you still have that. If you prune everything, you don’t prune the headers. So you have a nice chain of evidence.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:15:43
Okay, so let’s get to the reason why we’re discussing all of this, Sjors.
Sjors Provoost: 00:15:46
Exactly. So basically there was an email, let’s say Alice was asking Bob for coffee.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:15:53
You don’t want to trigger anyone so we’re just gonna use Alice and Bob.
Sjors Provoost: 00:15:57
Also don’t know the name of the sender. Let’s say Alice was asking Bob for a coffee back in 2015. And an email circulates on the internet. But you do see an email, so you might rightfully ask, okay, maybe this email is completely fake. Right? But the nice thing is that…
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:16:12
You can never trust Alice and Bob not to lie about coffee.
Sjors Provoost: 00:16:16
You’re not even trusting Alice or Bob because this email just comes out of nowhere. It wasn’t given to you by Alice or by Bob.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:16:23
I’m just saying I don’t trust Alice and Bob’s words for whether or not they had coffee together.
Sjors Provoost: 00:16:29
That’s true.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:16:30
I want cryptographic proof about them drinking coffee or not, Sjors.
Sjors Provoost: 00:16:33
Well, it doesn’t prove whether they actually drank coffee, right? It just proves that Alice asked Bob for coffee.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:16:30
I’ll settle for that.
Spam and Phishing
Sjors Provoost: 00:16:40
Okay, so the nice thing is we have this problem called spam and phishing, basically fake emails pretending to be somebody else. And the way that is partially solved is that mail servers can sign emails for you. So you don’t have to use PGP yourself, although of course you should, but the mail server will say, okay, this email goes to this person and here’s the signature, basically testifying to that. And Gmail does that standard.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:17:07
Right. So they have a special key to do that.
Sjors Provoost: 00:17:10
Yeah, exactly.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:17:11
So it’s basically in that case, Google saying, yep, this is the real email. This was the real sender. This was the real recipient. It was really Alice and Bob. And yes, they were really discussing getting a cup of coffee together.
Sjors Provoost: 00:17:24
Exactly and that of course might be enough because it depends on how much you trust Google of course. Google signs a couple of fields, which is the sender, the recipient, the time, and the contents of the message, so you know that. But we’re Bitcoiners, so we want to have more. And so the thing is that there is actually another email out there we can talk about, which is Greg Maxwell sending Peter Todd a message randomly about some Bitcoin thing, and it happens that Peter Todd timestamped that message back in 2016, and that message is using Google’s key.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:18:04
The same key.
Sjors Provoost: 00:18:06
So now we have proof that not only did Google sign this thing, they used a key that already existed back in those days. Because we know that key existed.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:18:16
Right, because it was timestamped on the Bitcoin blockchain back in those days.
Sjors Provoost: 00:18:20
Yeah, now that doesn’t really matter that this key existed because we already know Google signed it. If you assume Google lied about the timestamps that’d be weird.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:18:31
Still nice.
Sjors Provoost: 00:18:31
Yes, exactly.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:18:33
That’s a bit of a downer to end the podcast on.
Sjors Provoost: 00:18:35
Oh, we’re not ending the podcast.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:18:36
Let’s give some better examples than why OpenTimestamps is great.
Sjors Provoost: 00:18:40
Yeah, well, so the caveat is always people get really excited about timestamps and they are quite useful, but they are not magic bullets. And there’s a lot of things they can’t do. So don’t assign magic to them.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:18:53
Okay.
What you Cannot Prove with Timestamps
Sjors Provoost: 00:18:54
There’s a couple of things you cannot prove.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:18:55
So there wasn’t enough of a downer. Now you’re going to list more things you cannot do with timestamps?
Sjors Provoost: 00:18:59
That’s correct.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:19:00
Okay, let’s have it.
Sjors Provoost: 00:19:01
The things you cannot prove and sorry for all the double negatives, but you cannot prove that a document does not exist. And what this means is, you can say, hey, I said X back in 2015. You can prove that. But you cannot prove that you didn’t say X in 2015.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:19:19
You cannot say that you didn’t say X in 2015.
Sjors Provoost: 00:19:23
Right, if I say I never said blah in 2015, there’s no way for me to prove that. Unless I have like 24-hour footage.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:19:32
Right, of yourself.
Sjors Provoost: 00:19:34
Yeah, for the whole year. But other than that you can’t.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:19:37
Okay. But someone else might be able to, for example, with this email example,
Sjors Provoost: 00:19:44
Well, they can if you did say but not what I didn’t say. The other thing you can’t say is that there’s only one thing that I said. So I might have said in 2015, Bitcoin is gonna go to 100, and then I would say Bitcoin is gonna go to 1,000, and I would say Bitcoin is gonna go to 10,000, and then today I released the proof that I set the right price but you have no idea how many other prices I time stamped. So that’s important to keep in mind when people use time stamps in magic tricks.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:20:14
You might have just time stamped every single possible price for 2020 and then come out as a visionary in 2020 because you’re only revealing the one you got right.
Sjors Provoost: 00:20:25
Exactly. I also can’t prove that something is older than the timestamp. Basically if I timestamp something now then I have no way of proving that maybe it was ten years ago. So, if you have some sort of magical anti-aging medicine, you can say, oh, look at how I looked in 2016, but actually that was me in 1981 or something. Some more disappointments?
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:20:51
Yeah I want another one.
Sjors Provoost: 00:20:53
If you lose the proof or if you lose the original document well then you’re screwed because if you have the hash you cannot reconstruct the document. And if you just have the hash, I don’t think you can still figure out how to connect that to the thing in the blockchain. You need all these intermediate steps of the tree.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:21:11
Yeah, you need the document in order to prove that the hash matches the document by just hashing the document again. Plus you need all sorts of extra info to find it in the blockchain.
Sjors Provoost: 00:21:22
Yeah, that’s what you downloaded and hopefully saved in a file. And the last thing, that’s kind of a bummer, you can’t really prove that a website is real in general. It’s very difficult. So let’s say there’s a tweet, and the tweet has a URL, and if I give that to you… I cannot prove to you that that URL really contains that tweet. You can go to it yourself, but that’s the only way you can find out. And so that’s a problem if 10 years from now I want to prove that a certain tweet was real. If it’s still there, then I can prove that it existed. So I can make a timestamp of the website as the document looks, and then today you look at it again and you can see well I’m seeing the same text.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:22:09
So how would you fake that a website existed then?
Sjors Provoost: 00:22:13
I can just edit some HTML and make a different tweet. I can make a website that shows a tweet but the tweet could be complete nonsense and so I have no way to prove that but if the tweet didn’t change then I can prove it. But the problem is of course you can delete tweets. So that’s why you have things like the web archive. So you can make a timestamp of a tweet on the web archive. And if the web archive is still out there when you check the evidence, then you can prove that the tweet existed. But if the tweeter deletes that tweet and gets rid of the web archive, then you’re screwed.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:22:49
Couldn’t you make a backup of the web archive yourself?
Sjors Provoost: 00:22:51
But then how do you prove that’s the real web archive?
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:22:54
I don’t know. If you timestamp the web archive and keep a backup of the web archive, then…
Sjors Provoost: 00:23:00
Well, it depends on when you made it. So then the question is, when you made that backup, did you already know what things you needed to fake? Or was it impossible for you to know what things you needed to fake? So there’s still things you can do if you carefully think about what you have and what you don’t have. But it’s not magic.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:23:19
It’s not magic. So what is great about it?
Sjors Provoost: 00:23:22
Well, that’s why we have a list of called cool things.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:23:25
Nice.
Timestamping Git Commits
Sjors Provoost: 00:23:26
So one of the cool things you can do is you can timestamp git commits and Bitcoin Core is doing that. Which is nice.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:23:34
So every time there’s a new commit to the Bitcoin Core source code, that is timestamped.
Sjors Provoost: 00:23:40
Exactly.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:23:41
Right. Interesting.
Sjors Provoost: 00:23:41
And we know that all these commits that go into Bitcoin Core are signed by the maintainers too. So there’s two things. We have these timestamps and assuming somebody stores the evidence, multiple people store that evidence and the signatures are real. You can go back in time, look at these timestamps and see that the history is indeed what GitHub says it is.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:24:05
You can trace the entire history, or at least up to a point, of what the Bitcoin Core source code looked like. Now, if somehow there would be another version of history timestamped in there, then it’s either not signed by the maintainers, so it’s obvious that’s the fake one, or I guess in a worst case scenario, if it is signed by the maintainers,
Sjors Provoost: 00:24:29
Then we know that, that particular maintainer has been signing two versions of history.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:24:33
So we know there’s a problem at least.
Sjors Provoost: 00:24:35
You might still not know which is the real one, but you know there’s a very serious problem.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:24:39
Yeah, interesting. Okay, more cool stuff.
Sjors Provoost: 00:24:42
Another cool thing is actually the opposite. The Genesis block timestamps the times.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:24:48
Yeah, the newspaper, sure.
Sjors Provoost: 00:24:49
But actually it’s in practice more like the other way around, right? The fact that the time occurs in the Bitcoin blockchain, that times article from January 3rd, 2009, the fact that that occurs in the blockchain means that the blockchain must be more recent than that.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:25:06
The Genesis block at least. So the whole blockchain.
Sjors Provoost: 00:25:10
Yes, because everything else came after.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:25:12
Yes.
Sjors Provoost: 00:25:13
So that’s a nice example of how timestamps in the real world can prove what’s going on in Bitcoin. So you can use some of that magic to triangulate stuff if people put newspaper articles in the blockchain, then you have some extra assurance that this thing is really not older than you think it is.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:25:30
Okay, more cool stuff.
Limit the Scope of Fraud
Sjors Provoost: 00:25:31
Well, the last thing is more of a general claim that you can limit the scope of fraud, I believe that’s how Peter thought phrased it. So you cannot necessarily prevent all forms of fraud, as we discussed, it could be really funky things going on, but there are more limited things you can do, because these timestamps exist. You have to be more careful. You cannot, for example, say, hey, this Google key was recently created by a Russian hacker. No, we know it was out there in 2016. So there’s certain things you can no longer claim based on these timestamps. And as we described with the example of the hypothetical evil Bitcoin Core maintainer that changes history, you can then prove that there are two versions of history, and that is something they would have to think about.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:26:16
I think timestamps and these kinds of timestamps and OpenTimestamps are the most interesting and the most important non-monetary use of Bitcoin. I think it’s a big deal being able to timestamp documents in such a very viable way.
Sjors Provoost: 00:26:37
It’s definitely very cool and very useful.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:26:40
You know I’ve studied history and it’s a huge part of a historian’s job to find out if documents, if evidence is really as old as it’s supposed to be. A nice example is, I’m sure you’ve seen these photos of Joseph Stalin, where people are just photoshopped out before Photoshop was a thing.
Sjors Provoost: 00:26:59
Nowadays, everybody does that.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:27:02
Back in those days, that was a bit more original. But these are the kinds of things, like you can imagine how these kinds of trickeries could be prevented with something like OpenTimestamps somehow, or at least be made more obvious, or it could be a very useful tool for historians. Sjors, I’m going to tell you one more cool thing before we end this podcast.
Sjors Provoost: 00:27:24
All right, tell me.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:27:24
I think one of the nice things about OpenTimestamps is that it actually resembles the idea that is mentioned in the Bitcoin white paper, Scott Stornetta and Stuart Haber, if I’m recalling these names correctly. They had their own idea for timestamping back in the the late 80s or the early 90s. And back then, Stornetta’s idea, his concern was that, as long as we have paper documents, then forging paper documents, is at least kind of difficult. It’s at least sort of like it leaves traces or you can sort of tell that something has been doctored with or messed with, or it’s at least sort of possible while if we’re moving.
Sjors Provoost: 00:28:11
And you know how old paper is.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:28:13
Yeah, you can even tell how old paper is in many cases, or at least roughly. And if we’re moving to a digital world, that kind of stuff becomes completely impossible and every document can be altered in ways that are just unseeable. He and Haber tried to solve this problem. They couldn’t figure out how to solve this problem because every solution they come up with relied on some kind of third party to vouch that a document existed at a certain point in time. And maybe that third party would be checked by another, by fourth party, but there was always some trust involved, and that’s what I want to get rid of.
Sjors Provoost: 00:28:59
That sounds pretty problematic in the Stalin example you just mentioned.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:29:03
Exactly, yes. So, ultimately, they thought they were not going to be able to solve this problem, and then they wanted to at least prove that this was an unsolvable problem. But then while trying to prove that it was unsolvable, they came to the realization that this is actually solvable if everyone in the world is party of the timestamping process. So everyone in the world submits their hashes and everyone in this world receives the combined hashes in return. That way, if you want to forge history, you would have to corrupt everyone or it would be obvious to everyone, like no one’s going to go along with that. That was their solution, and this solution, I think, evolved. Ultimately, they came up with this idea of including the Merkle root into newspapers. Then there was a Merkle root in the New York Times of May 22nd, 1996. So you knew that documents existed back then. And ultimately, their ideas were inspiration for Satoshi Nakamoto. It was included in the Bitcoin white paper. And that’s interesting because now Peter Todd came up with a solution to actually implement a very similar solution into bitcoin, so we’ve sort of gone full circle.
Sjors Provoost: 00:30:26
Yeah it’s great because everybody wants the bitcoin blockchain, it’s very redundant
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:30:32
What?
Sjors Provoost: 00:30:32
It’s very redundant. Basically everybody has a copy of the Bitcoin blockchain. So just like that newspaper.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:30:38
Right, pretty much. Okay.
Sjors Provoost: 00:30:41
And they have a financial incentive to have this copy. It’s one thing to say everybody in the world must participate and have this hash, it’s another to say, well, if you want to use money you need to keep track of a hash and by the way it also fixes this timestamping problem. That’s all we’ve got.
Aaron van Wirdum: 00:30:57
I think so too, Sjors.
Sjors Provoost: 00:30:58
Thank you for listening to the The Van Wirdum Sjorsnado.