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Knowledge Base
Browse the concepts behind Truestamp. Pick a domain to explore, follow the links between concepts, or search across everything.
Tagged: history
17
Library
Anagram and Cipher Priority Claims
How 17th-century natural philosophers (Galileo, Huygens, Hooke, Newton) staked priority on a discovery by first publishing it as a dated anagram or letter-count cipher: a hand-built hide-and-bind commitment revealed later.
Cornerstones, Foundation Deposits, and Time Capsules
How dated, sealed deposits (Mesopotamian foundation pegs, Egyptian foundation deposits, Masonic cornerstones, and modern time capsules) bind an inscribed record into a tamper-evident context to prove provenance, authorship, and a not-later-than date.
Design of a Secure Timestamping Service with Minimal Trust Requirement
1999 UCL Crypto Group paper (Massias, Serret Avila, Quisquater) on the Belgian TIMESEC timestamping service: round-based Merkle trees, hash-linked round values, and newspaper publication to minimize trust in the authority.
How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document
Haber and Stornetta's 1991 Journal of Cryptology paper founding cryptographic digital timestamping via hashing, digital signatures, hash-linking chains, and distributed-trust witnessing.
Linked Timestamping (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia overview of linked timestamping: hash chains and Merkle trees that link time-stamps into a tamper-evident order, avoiding private keys, with history, standards, and blockchain publication.
Merkle tree - Wikipedia
Wikipedia's reference article on Merkle (hash) trees: leaf and parent hashing, the root hash, logarithmic inclusion verification, Ralph Merkle's 1979 patent, the second-preimage attack, and uses in Bitcoin, Git, ZFS, and Certificate Transparency.
Merkle Trees in Git and Bitcoin
Initial Commit blog article explaining how Git and Bitcoin both use Merkle trees and content-addressable hashing to build tamper-evident, verifiable distributed data structures.
Patents and Caveats as Priority Instruments
How patent filings and confidential caveats used a neutral state office to record a dated priority for an invention: an institutional timestamp and proof-of-existence marker, ancestor to modern cryptographic timestamping.
Poor Man's Copyright
The folk practice of mailing a sealed copy of your own work to yourself so the postal postmark serves as a dated third-party proof the contents existed by that date, with its copyright, authorship, and timestamping limits.
Provenance Marks and Registers
How registers, split tally sticks, assay hallmarks with date letters, dated colophons, and steganographic concealment served as pre-cryptographic proofs of priority, provenance, authorship, integrity, and timestamp.
Ralph Merkle - Wikipedia
Wikipedia biography of Ralph Merkle, co-inventor of public-key cryptography, inventor of Merkle trees and cryptographic hashing, and researcher in nanotechnology and cryonics.
Sealed Deposits with Learned Societies
How scientists secured priority by lodging a dated, signed sealed note with a learned society (the French pli cachete, the Soleau envelope), fixing a date without disclosing the content until the seal was opened.
Seals, Signets, and Notaries
How cylinder seals, wax signets, papal leaden bullae, and the notarial instrument bound authorship, authenticity, integrity, and provenance to documents and made tampering evident: physical ancestors of cryptographic proof of existence.
Stuart Haber - Wikipedia
Wikipedia biography of cryptographer Stuart Haber, co-author of the 1991 linked digital time-stamping work with Scott Stornetta, cited in the Bitcoin whitepaper and foundational to blockchain.
The First Blockchain or How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document
Decentralized Thoughts article by Ittai Abraham on the 1991 Haber-Stornetta digital timestamping scheme: hash chaining, Merkle trees, trusted repositories, and its influence on Bitcoin.
The Inventor of Blockchain Would Like a Better Bitcoin
Blockworks interview with cryptographic-timestamping pioneer Scott Stornetta on Bitcoin's achievements and flaws: incomplete decentralization, mining incentives, lack of monetary privacy, and immutable record-keeping against AI deepfakes.
Witnessed and Notarized Laboratory Notebooks
How inventors used bound, dated, countersigned or notarized laboratory notebooks to prove priority, authorship, and a not-later-than date under the historical US first-to-invent patent regime.
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