[Cryptography] [cryptography] NIST Randomness Beacon

[Bill Stewart]

At 07:03 PM 11/11/2013, Jerry Leichter wrote:
>In fact, a team at (I think) Bell Labs came up with a "digital 
>notary" service that did exactly this, in an efficient way.  It 
>combined the values sent to it into a public Merkle tree, and once a 
>day, published the current root hash in an ad in the New York 
>Times.  That service seems to have vanished (and the phrase "digital 
>notary" seems to have been re-applied to something else).  But there 
>are a number of "time-stamping" protocols, and a RFC (3161), an ANSI 
>standard (X9.95), and ISO/IEC standard (18014) for different kinds 
>of timestamps.  See 
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping for a discussion 
>of the general issue; 
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Timestamping has a discussion of 
>the style of timestamp I mentioned (there are other ways to 
>accomplish the same ends) along with a photo of a newspaper showing 
>a daily commitment.

I thought it was at BellCore by then?  Stu Haber, IIRC.
Of course, that presupposes the existence of news sources widely 
distributed in dead-tree form with classified ads, so it may not be a 
sustainable business model :-)