[Cryptography] Best internet crypto clock

Henry Baker hbaker1 at pipeline.com
Fri Oct 3 22:34:26 EDT 2014


At 05:37 PM 10/3/2014, Grant Schultz wrote:
>On 10/2/2014 11:00 AM, cryptography-request at metzdowd.com wrote:
>
>>In old B/W movies, when a person was kidnapped, the kidnapper sent a photo of the person together with a picture of the front page of today's newspaper to prove that he had the kidnapped person _on or after the date_ of the newspaper.
>
>Are you planning on kidnapping someone?

No.  But I would like to see some simple, robust Internet crypto services, starting with a simple crypto clock with reasonable resolution that can't be hacked by anyone, not even the NSA.

To a first approximation, the Bitcoin blockchain is the only current candidate, although at a much coarser resolution, a hash of all of the Fortune 500 daily closing stock prices would also function.

If there are any other candidates -- e.g., NIST "beacons" with some less-corruptible authentication mechanism -- that have the same level of non-hackability, I'd be interested in finding out about them.



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