Overview

This is a short research paper by Alessandro Vizzarri (Radiolabs, Consorzio Universita Industria, Rome, Italy), presented at SYSTEM 2020 (Symposium for Young Scientists in Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, online, 20 May 2020) and published in CEUR Workshop Proceedings Vol-2694 (pp. 36-43). It argues that Proof of Existence (PoE) for official eGovernment documents can be delivered by a peer-to-peer Bitcoin blockchain scheme that removes the trusted third party required by conventional information systems, thereby strengthening data integrity and temporal traceability between citizens and public entities.

Key points

• Contrasts three conventional eGovernment information-system architectures (centralized, decentralized, distributed) which all rely on a trusted third party and remain exposed to PoE corruption, digital identity theft, and alteration of timestamps or documents.
• Proposes a blockchain-based alternative modeled on Bitcoin as a “Public Distributed Verifiable Cryptographic Ledger,” where municipality, tax register, land register, and citizens are equal peers reading, writing, and sharing data with no central authority.
• Documents are reduced to a SHA-256 hash and recorded on Bitcoin via the OP_RETURN opcode, a non-spendable transaction that permits inserting a data stream of up to 80 bytes; confirmation of that transaction proves the document existed before the confirmation time.
• Verification is performed by searching the ledger for the citizen’s Bitcoin address, the transaction ID (TxID), and the block height; the proof is checkable independently on each peer’s local copy of the ledger.
• Reviews the underlying Bitcoin mechanics used for the scheme: ECDSA key pairs and wallet (256-bit private key, 130-bit public key, 160-bit address), UTXO transactions, block headers with a double-SHA-256 Merkle root, previous-block-hash chaining, and hashcash proof of work targeting a roughly 10-minute block interval.
• A comparison table concludes the blockchain configuration uniquely needs no trusted third party, authenticates via Bitcoin address, provides hash-based data integrity, and preserves availability through peer replication; future work targets an experimental implementation.

Relevance to Truestamp

The paper’s core mechanism, hashing a document and recording that hash on the Bitcoin blockchain as durable proof of prior existence, is the same public-ledger commitment idea Truestamp uses, though Truestamp commits a Merkle root covering many items rather than one document hash per transaction, and frames its guarantee as a submission window rather than creation time. Its use of Bitcoin OP_RETURN and RFC 6962-style Merkle hashing overlaps directly with Truestamp’s blockchain and Merkle domains.

Citations

1. Blockchain-based Infrastructure for Proof of Existence in eGovernment. Alessandro Vizzarri, SYSTEM 2020, CEUR Workshop Proceedings Vol-2694, pp. 36-43.