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The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New York Times Since 1995

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Re: The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New York Times Since 1995

#71

Post by joshuamorton »

zaarn wrote: post #40
sametmax wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't have decentralized production and validation of blocks, you don't have a block chain.

You don't need decentralization for a blockchain. All you need is 1) a reverse linked list of entries and 2) have the list be cryptographic in nature. Even git can be used for a blockchain since it uses a cryptographic hash for commits and can use GPG signing. Validation, consensus and decentralizations are additional properties that you can add on top that make it useful for certain use cases.

Except that's a merkle tree. Which we already have a word for. Git isn't a blockchain, but it is a merkle tree. Blockchains are merkle trees, but the reverse isn't true.

A reasonable definition might be that a blockchain is a decentralized merkle tree.

Re: The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New York Times Since 1995

#72

Post by phyzome »

bittcto wrote: post #46
phyzome wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article doesn't make it totally explicit, but it sure sounds like each new hash incorporated the previous one. (It's also possible that each published hash is just a brand new hash of the aggregate, but this seems somewhat less likely based on the wording.) ETA: Looks like it's a chain, or rather a Merkle tree. From the horse's mouth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17865168

A Merkle root including previous Merkle roots may have been innovative when Surety started, but while its required in bitcoin its not a key feature of what defines a Blockchain.

Given that "blockchain" is a generalization of Bitcoin, not formally defined theoretically beforehand, I suspect we would not agree on what a blockchain even is, and would go 'round and 'round in circles.

But I think we can agree that a Merkle chain like this would be sufficient for most of the things people are trying to use blockchains for recently, which certainly says something.

Re: The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New York Times Since 1995

#73

Post by phyzome »

lmilcin wrote: post #36

It is a hash of a block, but not a chain. For this to be a chain, it would have to be published multiple times, each time containing references to previous blocks under the published hash. Other than that I am pretty sure we can find many more examples. Hashing and publishing the hash is pretty popular way to prove timestamp of a secret without revealing the secret, yet. I did it myself a couple of times when I wante…

It's a chain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17865168

Re: The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New York Times Since 1995

#74

Post by lmilcin »

sorokod wrote: post #54
lmilcin wrote: post #36

It is a hash of a block, but not a chain. For this to be a chain, it would have to be published multiple times, each time containing references to previous blocks under the published hash. Other than that I am pretty sure we can find many more examples. Hashing and publishing the hash is pretty popular way to prove timestamp of a secret without revealing the secret, yet. I did it myself a couple of times when I wante…

Other than that I am pretty sure we can find many more examples. This statement could be made much more interesting and convincing if you provided some actual examples.

It's not difficult to find examples:

https://twitter.com/gruber/status/991122089557004288?lang=en

There is even whole industry around the concept, it is called trusted timestamping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping

It basically works like this, you compute a hash of the document and send to some kind of service that will either publish your hash with the timestamp or will also sign the hash and the timestamp cryptographically without ever touching the document.

Later, you can refer somebody to the external service or let them examine the signature and the hash to prove that you were in possession of the information before certain date and time.

Re: The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New York Times Since 1995

#75

Post by lmilcin »

phyzome wrote: post #73
lmilcin wrote: post #36

It is a hash of a block, but not a chain. For this to be a chain, it would have to be published multiple times, each time containing references to previous blocks under the published hash. Other than that I am pretty sure we can find many more examples. Hashing and publishing the hash is pretty popular way to prove timestamp of a secret without revealing the secret, yet. I did it myself a couple of times when I wante…

It's a chain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17865168

Thank you for posting this and clearing it up. This was missing from the original article.

Re: The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New York Times Since 1995

#76

Post by phyzome »

lmilcin wrote: post #75
phyzome wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a chain: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17865168

Thank you for posting this and clearing it up. This was missing from the original article.

Yes, I found it quite frustrating as well. -.-

Re: The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New York Times Since 1995

#77

Post by JWett »

lmilcin wrote: post #74
sorokod wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other than that I am pretty sure we can find many more examples. This statement could be made much more interesting and convincing if you provided some actual examples.

It's not difficult to find examples: https://twitter.com/gruber/status/991122089557004288?lang=en There is even whole industry around the concept, it is called trusted timestamping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping It basically works like this, you compute a hash of the document and send to some kind of service that will either publish your hash with the timestamp or will also sign the hash and the…

"Hash and Sign" timestamping is flawed in that it relies on the trust of a central authority. An insider with access to the private key could easily backdate a timestamp and sign any document/timestamp combination. Surety's widely-witnessed approach was meant to fix this issue.

Chaining the hash values made it fundamentally impossible for any malicious actor to generate a notary certificate for a future document that would roll up and produce the correct super hash value that is woven into the chain.

Re: The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New York Times Since 1995

#78

Post by JWett »

prepend wrote: post #41
JWett wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, ex-CEO of Surety here. The article is not very technical so I can see where you might assume this is not a true blockchain. However, the hash value published in the Times was, in fact, dependent upon every single hash value for every digital "document" ever submitted to the Digital Notary Service. A Digital Notary client application would submit a hash value (which in the early days was a combination of MD5 and S…

Doesn’t this rely on Surety being trusted though? It seems technically possible for Surety to modify documents consistently in and out so the hashes are consistent, but not representative of the submitted documents. Especially back in the 90s when generating crypto hashes wasn’t as easy for users. So this is similar to notaries where the trust lies with a different party. The killer app, I think, that made blockchain…

Surety is not a trusted central authority. There is no mathematically feasible way to backdate a document and weave it into the chain. The only way to circumvent the system would be to generate the same submitted hash value (using two different hash algorithms) with a different document. Additionally, for it to be actually useful, you would need to generate a hash collision for a different document with a purposeful modification (for example, changing the amount due for an invoice.) I can't begin to calculate the odds on making that happen.

Also note the hash values sent to Surety were calculated on the end user's computer. Surety never sees the actual file being timestamped.

As for the safety deposit box metaphor, the Haber-Stornetta approach is akin to nailing the hash to a post in the town square.

Re: The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New York Times Since 1995

#79

Post by Groxx »

phyzome wrote: post #72
bittcto wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Merkle root including previous Merkle roots may have been innovative when Surety started, but while its required in bitcoin its not a key feature of what defines a Blockchain.

Given that "blockchain" is a generalization of Bitcoin, not formally defined theoretically beforehand, I suspect we would not agree on what a blockchain even is, and would go 'round and 'round in circles. But I think we can agree that a Merkle chain like this would be sufficient for most of the things people are trying to use blockchains for recently, which certainly says something.

Yea, I think most would lean towards requiring one or both of:

    - it's a distributed consensus system (often around "blocks", but e.g. iota is not)
    - it's a chain of hashes to prevent mutation (around "chains")
And I doubt we'll ever get everyone to agree on what subset (including null) of those are "a blockchain".

Very (very) few things benefit from distributed consensus IMO. And not all altcoins use blocks at all. So I tend to lean towards hash-chains. Publicly-verifiable immutability is useful in quite a lot of real-world scenarios.

Re: The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New York Times Since 1995

#80

Post by bigiain »

jobigoud wrote: post #26
bigiain wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels a bit like that's a post-facto argument to me. It sounds like the Surity thing had "blocks" consisting of a week's worth of documents which got chained together and had their hash published irrevocably every week. Without the subsequent invention and popularity of the specific implementation of the bitcoin blockchain - I don't think the slow/costly consensus "feature" could be considered a requirement to distin…

> I'm still pissed at all the people who've decided they should call my non-autonomous quadcopters "drones" Apparently we should call them quadpters because it's based on helicopter for which the ethymology is not heli + copter, but helico + pter, like in helicoidal and pterodactyl.

From now on, I'm shall call them "spinning dinosaurs"!

"Hey mister! Is that your drone?" "No kid, it's not a drone, it's a spinning dinosaur..."

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