> oath = "Oh you know what an alternative use is? Oaths. Works with old ASICs as well...well I think. So you take a document, like this comment, you append a nonce (you'll see) and you hash it until you get a lot of zeroes in the front. Same as bitcoin, but you're not hashing the bitcoin protocol. Then, you know the document has been sworn, as a cryptographic oath, to that extent. Nonce: 38943"
Note the leading 0's. That's no timestamp, that's an oath.
In reply to the sibling comment: no. I like timestamp.com, and in fact I could have never found out about it other than by talking about the oath concept, but this is not just including it in the blockchain. It's proving its value to the author to bother doing the work of getting a good nonce for it. Literally putting my money where my mouth is. And swearing an oath to that extent, I could cryptographically swear it more, with more work, or use a smaller less impressive nonce if I'm not as sure.
And incentives? There is an incentive for me. At the same time it is effectively burning money, swearing by burning money. Took like seven seconds of compute, too. I had to wait human time for that. It's collateral, it's an oath. And it's an impediment to forgery, and in addition, an impediment to eg news sites telling different people different things. With oaths they have to tell everybody the same thing.
> oath = "Oh you know what an alternative use is? Oaths. Works with old ASICs as well...well I think. So you take a document, like this comment, you append a nonce (you'll see) and you hash it until you get a lot of zeroes in the front. Same as bitcoin, but you're not hashing the bitcoin protocol. Then, you know the document has been sworn, as a cryptographic oath, to that extent. Nonce: 38943"
> sha256(oath) 00009ea9ab415b7f60cd43571c159d1bf1e01de4bae6a706ec9053ceb94d385c
Note the leading 0's. That's no timestamp, that's an oath.
In reply to the sibling comment: no. I like timestamp.com, and in fact I could have never found out about it other than by talking about the oath concept, but this is not just including it in the blockchain. It's proving its value to the author to bother doing the work of getting a good nonce for it. Literally putting my money where my mouth is. And swearing an oath to that extent, I could cryptographically swear it more, with more work, or use a smaller less impressive nonce if I'm not as sure.
And incentives? There is an incentive for me. At the same time it is effectively burning money, swearing by burning money. Took like seven seconds of compute, too. I had to wait human time for that. It's collateral, it's an oath. And it's an impediment to forgery, and in addition, an impediment to eg news sites telling different people different things. With oaths they have to tell everybody the same thing.