Provenance Documents on Blockchain: Hashing, Legality, and Proof
We are happy to announce Proof Documents, the latest addition to the Proof Dashboard and one of the first files on blockchain applications. Proof Documents is a platform connected to the Proof Asset Dashboard which allows users to upload their files to a blockchain and save a hash of the file to The Proof Sidechain. In short, Proof Documents allows you to post a document or image to a blockchain and save it in perpetuity, theoretically, until the end of the Internet or when everyone closes nodes which is unlikely. We will be posting an article on blockchain, permanence, and game-theory in the future so more on that shortly.
How does it work?
The first step for saving a document is, of course, generating a document. In one case, the document could be a legal contract that you create to dictate the legal framework an asset’s smart contract. The document would be paired with the inputs of the initial issuance and would state a difference or overriding of certain elements of a programmatic runtime. Both Eris and Corda have been set up to explicitly allow for this functionality while Hyperledger Fabric, Ethereum, and Chaincore have the ability to post documents as data on their blockchains. In the case of a dispute or system failure, the document could be used to assign liability to pertinent parties. We will be posting a post soon outlining the benefits, challenges, and questions that come along with a system like this.
Proof Documents contains the functionality to post and link this document to the blockchain of your choice. Likewise, Proof Asset Dashboard allows for the posting of documents alongside all document transfers and issuances. We recommend a legal professional drafted PDF signed in accordance to the E-signing protocols of your local government. With Proof, document provenance and scope are now not only implicit to the creation of assets but also instrumental to their legislation. Likewise, services Storj and Factum offer solutions with the former currently being more of an engine for placing documents on the blockchain. We will be focusing on the Proof platform for the rest of this post.
After setting up a document and running it by your attorney, you can go to Proof Documents and post your document. Our platform is powered by Storj. After submitting your document, it is SHA256 hashed, encrypted, and then broken into chunks to be placed on multiple harddisks verified by blockchain technologies. The API keeps pointers to each piece for later file retrieval.
After Proofdocs saves the document, it takes the hash created in the aforementioned step and saves it to our sidechain for later look up and verification. If you are curious about what a hash is, think of it as the answer of a math problem that cannot be used to calculate the question. Remember in math class when we took a + b = c and then could use c to calculate a or b? In the case of a hash, c cannot be used to calculate anything about a or b. However, if a and b are the same, c will always be the same.
The sidechain stores the hash as a numeric-only hex number. Hex is a standard using a base-16 (1–9,a-f) counting system, while numeric-only hex only contains numbers which encode to letters and commands. Once you place your document on the Proof Sidechain you will receive a transaction hash which can be used to view both the hash and immutable timestamp of your document. You can decode the numerical hex by visiting one of the many hex-to-string websites on the web.
As a side note, keep in mind that the tiniest change to a SHA256’s input document will dramatically change the hash which is generated. Blockchain itself uses hashes extensively for generating and proving the identities of transactions, blocks, and keys while not needing to look over the entire document itself. In the case of Proof, we do not hash the ‘contents’ of the document but rather its ‘data’. That means if anyone changes a signature, margin size, letter, or a single pixel of your file, the hash will no longer match with the one initially generated, protecting you against fraudulent tampering of your document.
What does this mean?
The ability to quickly place and view documents on a blockchain with the confidence that those documents have not changed have some interesting implications and possible use cases. For instance, for your personal documents: if you wanted to save, say a birth certificate or will, a mature blockchain would be a great place to put it as the chain will never go down due to home destruction (god forbid) and will shield you from the ever present demon of simply misplacing it. Likewise, decentralized storage offers many interest points for legal professionals as the timestamps, verification procedures, and immutability of blockchain data creates a new standard for data certainty for legal engineers. Finally but not finally, the ability to create and store documents, images, or any file on this kind of ledger could become the new standard for issuing and handling copyrights, especially when you add smart contract functionality.
Why Place Documents on Proof Documents?
Legal Docs
With thousands of man-hours dedicated to documentary provenance and integrity, your legal department may be torching hundreds of employee-hours on menial tasks such as matching labels for data certainty or combing through stacks of handwritten affidavits when your best people could be out opening new accounts. Proof Docs allows you to upload your legal documents to a distributed database, establishing an immutable time-stamp with full confidentiality and integrity validation through the latest blockchain, hashing, and encryption technologies. With Proof Docs, your legal team can stop burning away hours and instead start forging new ones.
We will be soon posting a series of legal-think blog posts on this account to further investigate this exciting space.
Copyright
Protecting your intellectual property is core to your business. Being able to rapidly prove that you created an idea, an image, a song, or a product can mean the difference between winning gold or not even reaching the finish line. Proof Documents offers you a platinum starting block when you upload a document to the platform, allowing both a hash and a time stamp to be stored across multiple database nodes on an immutable blockchain. Along with the meta-data, you can even upload the work itself for immutable storage and recordation. If anyone ever disputes the validity of your claim, you can prove the exact time and content of your property, and conversely, you can use this information to ensure you get credit for your work, ideas, and passion.
With a smart contract, you could grant ‘access tokens’ which would restrict who could access and use a file based on whatever credentials you stipulate, closing off access after a short period of time. For instance, if you had a film screener for your new indie film about someone finding themselves in this crazy world but didn’t want the content leaked, you could restrict viewership to a select few and then also know who accessed the film, when they accessed it, and also had full ownership of the time and place the film was released. Anyone who wanted to access the file would need to show their token first (which could have limited viewings as well) and so if it were to leak, you could know who did it and when with the security of an immutable ledger.
