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Timestamping can be accomplished cheaply by piggy backing on a secure blockchain that’s already being used for the purpose of money (Bitcoin). No need to start from scratch for each use case.

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I agree that if you are doing a one off that nobody is likely to care about until some much later date it's probably worth while to OP_RETURN some proof on Bitcoin or something like that as it would be less ambiguous to prove that you knew something at that point. On the other hand you could encode whatever you like in some field of a fake PGP key and upload that to key servers.. and at the same time post it here in HN in a comment and tweet it, and that's really good enough to satisfy almost everyone as it is. There's just so many ways to get arbitrary data written into logs that can be used as evidence later. We're already drowning in distributed systems that log our every move.

For anything that involves timestamping some assertion that many parties care about on an ongoing basis it's much cheaper to have a distributed system of watchers. See certificate transparency. There's a lot of commercial inventive to want to falsify that, but is anyone able to in practice? There's no blockchain there.

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