This thesis has been realized for the obtention of the Master's in Mathematical Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano.
Proving that data existed prior to a certain time is helpful in several situations. Thanks to systems achieving distributed consensus without relying on a trusted third party, like Bitcoin, it is possible to enhance the security of such timestamps. OpenTimestamps is a protocol defining a standard for creating timestamps and, in addition, it provides a scalability solution. Currently, an improvement concerning elliptic curve commitments has been proposed. We aim to give an exhaustive overview upon this new scheme, its implications and motivations, culminating in the development of a real world application.
- Blog post on sign-to-contract;
- Electrum timestamp plugin (switch to branch
s2cto include sign-to-contract timestamping).