Comment by onyb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onyb | Hacker News Reader

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At my previous job, in a legal-tech company, we used Woleet to build a copyright protection product for intellectual property. However, I believe IPFS [1] is a superior solution for proof-of-existence, compared to timestamping on Bitcoin.

With Woleet, you must keep the original payload (file + personal identification) that was timestamped, for eternity. In the event of a copyright violation, you must be able to prove in front of a judge that hash of the file in your possession is indeed what exists on the Bitcoin blockchain.

With IPFS, you only need to save the hash of the payload (or a human-readable name, with IPNS [2]), to convince the judge that you authored the original file at a certain point in time. Additionally, IPFS has version control. This means that if you want to prove to a court that some revision to the T&Cs of your product were made before a certain date, it makes more sense to use IPFS.

[1] https://ipfs.io [2] https://docs.ipfs.io/guides/concepts/ipns

You can't prove a file existed before a certain date with IPFS like you can with Bitcoin.

Yes, if I understand IPFS correctly, you can. Since IPFS works as a content addressed system, if you embed the date, send the document to the judge (the hash which is based on the content), don't show it until a later point, you can prove the document is the same as you sent, even without revealing the content until later.

IPFS doesn't seem to have anything about "version control" as onyb mentioned.

what prevents me from pre-dating a document on IPFS?

how you will embed the date?

The IPFS hash is a hash of the content. Simply including the date as text would suffice.

What stops you from backdating a document when you write it?

Nothing. Including the date doesn't do anything other than commit yourself to stating that date, the important part is the date at which you commit to the hash.

I'm assuming to you add the document (with date) to IPFS without being connected to the network (no actual data gets shared, only hash), gets the hash and send it over to the person you need to prove the document's date to. They won't be able to get it (since content itself is offline) and once you want to prove it, you add it again or make it otherwise online. Then they can fetch the same hash and confirm they received the hash at the date.

I am confused, how you can prove the date and ownership ? Does IPNS have some kind of timestamp?

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