Overview

This Bitcoin Magazine feature reports on Simple Proof, a Guatemalan startup that used the Bitcoin blockchain to protect the integrity of the country’s 2023 presidential election. Working with the Supreme Elections Tribunal (TSE) and deployed by ITZ DATA, Simple Proof’s “Immutable Backup” system created tamper-evident digital records of polling-station tally sheets. It relies on OpenTimestamps, the Bitcoin timestamping tool created by developer Peter Todd, to produce a decentralized proof of existence that any citizen can verify independently, replacing blind trust in officials with public cryptographic evidence.

Key points

• Simple Proof timestamped election tally sheets (per-candidate vote counts from polling stations) so that any later alteration would produce a different hash and be immediately detectable.
• The technical basis is OpenTimestamps: documents are hashed, many hashes are aggregated into a Merkle tree, and the single root hash is recorded in a Bitcoin transaction, minimizing on-chain cost while committing all documents at once.
• Recording the Merkle root on the Bitcoin blockchain provides an independent, timezone-agnostic timestamp proving each document existed at or before a given block.
• A dedicated public web portal let citizens verify tally-sheet timestamps themselves, enabling crowd-sourced validation rather than reliance on trusted authorities.
• During disputes over president-elect Bernardo Arevalo’s victory, opposition claims that a sheet was timestamped before polls closed were shown to be a timezone misreading; the Bitcoin ledger confirmed the timestamps were accurate.
• The article frames blockchain timestamping as a tool for electoral transparency and democratic stability in contexts vulnerable to corruption and disinformation.

Relevance to Truestamp

The Simple Proof deployment demonstrates the same core primitive Truestamp productizes: hashing content, aggregating hashes into a Merkle tree, and committing the root to a public blockchain such as Bitcoin to prove a document existed by a certain time. It illustrates the real-world value of proof-of-existence and what Truestamp proves, including the distinction between provable submission timing and unprovable creation time.

Citations

1. How The Bitcoin Blockchain Is Fighting Fraud In Guatemala’s Presidential Elections. Bitcoin Magazine (Culture).