The chapter highlights the use of blockchain-based timestamping systems as a reliable solution for ensuring the authenticity and immutability of digital materials in various contexts. These systems leverage distributed consensus, cryptography, and smart contracts to guarantee non-modifiable timestamps, which ultimately leads to increased trust and transparency in transactions. The chapter explores the core concepts and applications of blockchain-based timestamping, including its role in verifying historical data and its applications in artificial intelligence, smart contracts, banking, insurance, and legal transactions. Additionally, the chapter discusses recent research, barriers, and future considerations such as scalability, interoperability, regulatory compliance, user experience, and environmental sustainability. Overall, the aim of the chapter is to analyze the power of blockchain-based timestamping in shaping the future of digital trust and security.
Top1. Introduction
The idea of chronometry is also important in various fields and serves for the preservation, originality, and indestructibility of the electronic communications. Classically, timestamping techniques though have been flawless in offering impregnable security and the prevention of fraud still pose challenges in these two areas. Nowadays, blockchain technology has brought a new time stamp system where a decentralized and transparent environment can store and save the invincible information in an immutable way. In this part the timestamping in the blockchain age is going to be described outlining the evolution of this technology and the effects of eating off on the traditional timestamping.
Blockchain technology which is deemed to be the source of Bitcoin birth was created in 2008 by a person who assumed the name Satoshi Nakamoto. It is an underlying technology that powers the decentralized digital currencies. On top of having, it starts only in a finance field, blockchain has contacted nearly all domains, like: supply chain management, healthcare, legal services and IoT (Internet of Things). Fundamentally, a blockchain is a record distributed among many computers, and transactions are managed in a nor enable, chronological way. As you have a block that stored a hash of the pre-block cryptographically at each block it forms a chain of linked block, highly resistant to modification. This distinctive property of blockchain, combined with consensus algorithms that run on such like Proof of Work (PoW) or Proof of Stake (PoS), ensures the integrity and safety of data stored within the network.
An in-built feature of the Blockchain is its ability to provide a form of 'time-stamping'. Usually, timestamps, in the circumstances before, are brought forth by a third party with a verifiable authority or a notary public often. Yet, these concentrative mechanisms are vulnerable to sabotage or defectiveness that they give birth to the doubtfulness and impreciseness of the timestamps. Blockchain-based timestamping tackles these issues by utilizing the hi-tech of distributed ledgers that is based on blocks that are both decentralized and immutable. In blockchain-based timestamping, a cryptographic hash of data towards being inserted is simply followed by the insertion timestamp (the time when it is inserted) into the blockchain. This procedure that is usually referred to as anchoring or solid verification presents an honest document that is used to validate the existence of data at various point of time. Using blockchain data for the warrant, all important facts about events, documents, or digital assets will be safely kept. There is no need for central authorities as well.
The mechanisms that timestamp on blockchain may include Médias signatures until Smart Contracts. In the blockchain age, Abadi et al. (2020) Timed Signatures and Zero-Knowledge Proofs have been employed as the most compact solutions in timestamping with safeguarding the individual`s privacy together with verifiability. Estevam et al. (2021) have given a precise and decentralized timestamping method using smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain and showed the practicality and effectiveness of timestamps in smart contracts for electronic transactions by blockchain.
Blockchain timestamping instruments go far, providing the intensively used service across the most common business sectors. Blockchain has the capacity to both ensure the integrity and legitimacy of the digital documents one uses in legal proceedings (Ahmad et al., 2020) and enable a tamper-proof evidence management system which (Daraghmi et al., 2021), is named one of the most attractive and highly discussed topics of recent times. Also, the inclusion of blockchain technology to trending parameters such as the Internet of Things (IoT, Alam, 2022) and digital forensics (Mahrous et al., 2021) can still expand the platform's reach and influence in the contemporary digital age.