[Cryptography] Best internet crypto clock

Ben Laurie benl at google.com
Mon Oct 6 06:59:28 EDT 2014


On 4 October 2014 03:34, Henry Baker <hbaker1 at pipeline.com> wrote:
> 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.

That would prevent forgeries in the future, but not the past.


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