Overview

Creation time is the moment a piece of content was originally made, and a Truestamp proof deliberately does not attest it. A proof pins data to a submission window: submitted after one block and before the block that includes it. It says nothing about how long the data existed before that window; a document held for a year and then submitted proves only that it existed by the time it was submitted. Cryptography cannot look backward in time: a hash proves the data existed at submission, because a matching hash cannot be produced without the data, but it cannot prove the data did not already exist earlier. This is why Truestamp always phrases the guarantee as “submitted” and “submission window” and never as “created” or “creation time”. The full discussion is in what Truestamp does not prove and the submission window.