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Comment by notacoward | Hacker News Reader

I'm not exactly a big Bitcoin booster, but I love the way techniques and structures developed for it are being adapted to uses like this.

Given that this seems very similar to el33th4xor's Virtual Notary, how would one distinguish between the strengths or use cases of the two?

http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/06/20/virtual-notary-intr...

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Technical differences aside, proofofexistence.com predates the Cornell team's blogpost by a couple of months.[2] I am not surprised that the Cornell team did not cite the bitcointalk forum post (given the recent frenzy of their Selfish Mining paper, where they neglected to cite a fairly closely related forum post from two years earlier). However, a published paper, CommitCoin,[1] predates both of these by about a year.

I don't believe there is any meaningful technical difference among these.

[1] Clark, Jeremy, and Aleksander Essex. "CommitCoin: Carbon dating commitments with bitcoin." Financial Cryptography and Data Security. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2012. 390-398.

[2] www.proofofexistence.com - Upload a document and have it certified by the Bitcoin blockchain bitcointalk user: maraoz https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=212701.0

Timestamping services are not novel and date way back before 2012. The earliest work I know of is from AT&T back in the 80's, where they proposed to publish the hash in the NYT. The idea was so well established that there is even an RFC [1] from 2001. And by the way, virtual-notary.org was online for several months or perhaps even a year before the blog post.

But the important differences are actually technical. Virtual Notary is a much more general service, offering to attest to any kind of online factoid. Let's elevate the discussion here -- it doesn't matter who was there first (because the AT&T folks were there two decades before both services), what matters is who offers the most useful service [3].

As for the previous work on selfish mining, see here [2].

[1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3161.txt

[2] http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/09/no-you-dint/

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6819835

Virtual Notary offers a superset of the document verification service offered by proofofexistence.com.

It's best to think of Virtual Notary as a impartial online witness to factoids that can be checked online. Besides documents, it can attest to the content of web pages, tweets, weather conditions, stock prices, exchange rates, employment status (for those institutions where we know how to check employment status), house features and prices, etc.

It can also issue official, certified random numbers.

Virtual Notary also allows the users to download an independently-verifiable X509 certificate of attestation.

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