Got Something to Prove? Blockchains Often Offer a Better Way — but They’re Not All Created Equal

Provably first? Provably available? Provably unchanged?

For many types of digital information, these questions were often quite difficult — if not impossible — to answer.

Sure, there are audit trails, server logs, and so on. But can you prove that you didn’t falsify yours? Or that someone else didn’t tamper with theirs?

Then came blockchains.

For around 10 years, blockchains have made it relatively easy to prove that certain data existed at a certain time — and therefore make it easy to recognize subsequent changes to it.

Without going into too much detail here, it basically involves what we think of as “transparently sealing” data into a block on a blockchain.

• “Sealing” as in once it’s there, it’s there permanently along with a record of when it got sealed.
• And “transparently” as in anyone can see it and verify that it’s there.

There are a couple of important variations on transparently sealing data:

Timestamping is a another popular term for this basic idea when there are very small — as in a few bytes — of data are transparently sealed into a blockchain. Let’s say you have something digital, like a document. You can run it through a hashing function to create a unique hash, which is a string of characters usually only a few bytes in size. You seal this hash into the blockchain and create an immutable record that the document existed at that time and in a certain way.

If a different version of that document pops up in the future, it will not produce the same hash if you run it through the same hashing function. Therefore, you have proof of any changes to the document and that your version came first.

Note that here you are not sealing the document itself into the blockchain — just the hash you created for it. The document itself can remain private, or you can distribute it how you see fit.

Document storage, as the term suggests, means sealing an entire document into the blockchain. In principle, it could be any type of digital file. But documentation is the most commonly envisioned use case in this context.

Documents sealed into a blockchain are secure in that you can be sure you are downloading the file that was originally sealed into a block. Nobody could have tampered with it.

And if the blockchain is public, so are the documents — as are the contents of all the blocks on a public blockchain.

So the use cases here usually involve proving that certain unchangeable data was publicly available at a certain time. Think, for example, about a document from a bank publicly disclosing fee changes for all account holders. In the EU, the law requires banks to provide this information in a way that cannot be manipulated and that can be proven to have existed a certain amount of time prior to the fee change. Blockchain document storage is a natural fit for this type of scenario.

In comparison, blockchain document storage is probably not ideal for your individual account statements from the bank. Unless you want them to be public information for some reason!

These basic ideas are the foundation of just about any timestamping or blockchain document storage solutions you’re likely to happen across on the internet.

The thing is:

Many popular blockchain data sealing solutions use the most commonly recognizable blockchains, i.e. Bitcoin or Ethereum. That’s not always ideal.

At the most basic level, using popular blockchains can make sense. Blockchains run on nodes and the more nodes there are, the less likely a blockchain is to simply disappear.

But assuming a blockchain has a resonable number of nodes running, you can choose a blockchain that is more friendly for transparently sealing data.

There are three important variables here:

Variable #1 is blockchain’s transaction size limits.

How much data you can seal into a blockchain’s block will obviously be a key factor in what you can do with it in this context.

For example, Bitcoin has quite small transaction limits and cannot be effectively used for on-chain document storage.

A larger transaction size limit means more flexibility as to how much data — in practical terms, the types of digital files — you can seal into a blockchain.

Variable #2 is a blockchain’s block time.

Faster block times means data can be sealed into blockchain blocks in tighter intervals. The time of the seal is therefore more accurate.

All data sealed into a block gets sealed at the same time, so a longer block time means more sealed data and less accuracy as to which actually went into the blockchain first.

A blockchain with a relatively long block time — like Bitcoin — can therefore be a reasonable choice for “casual” data sealers. But imagine a future where, for example, auction bids must be sealed by a blockchain for legal purposes. Waiting around for 10 minutes or more a block to complete would be quite inconvenient. Faster block times would streamline the process.

Variable #3 is the price of the blockchain’s native cryptocurrency.

To complete your transaction — i.e. transparently seal your data into a blockchain — a blockchain miner needs to pick it up in exchange for a fee. The more expensive a blockchain’s native cryptocurrency, the more expensive your transaction will be.

With BTC as the highest priced cryptocurrency, the Bitcoin blockchain is obviously the most expensive to pick for transparently sealing data.

BlockStamp is a great choice for transparently sealing data considering all three variables.

BlockStamp is a fork of the Bitcoin blockchain but has several important differences:

• 1 minute block times, far faster than Bitcoin
• 1 MB transaction size limits, which allows for both timestamping and document storage
• a competitively priced crypto coin that makes transparently sealing data very economical compared to Bitcoin or even Ethereum

That means that as blockchain document management starts gain popularity and users start “looking under the hood” of the blockchains they are using for that purpose, BlockStamp is shaping up to be one of their top choices!

About BlockStamp:

BlockStamp is a multipurpose Bitcoin blockchain fork developed by the BlockStamp Foundation, a not-for-profit organization. Designed to promote liberty, transparency, and sovereignty in areas of the digital economy where these fundamental values are most at risk, BlockStamp hosts a radically fair gambling platform, a digital tool for transparently sealing data, and a censorship-proof internet Domain Naming System.