11 standards
Using the chain as a clock. Standards here cover signing a hash so you can later prove a document existed, allocating and proving time spent, and expiring an action that was never completed.
Also searched as timestamp, notary, expiry, liveness, time allocation, proof of existence.
11 standards, spread across 4 of the 12 topics.
Proving something existed and was signed at a certain time normally means publishing the thing itself. This puts only a hash on the chain and issues a certificate anyone can check, so the content stays private.
Filed under Applications
Notarization and time is the main subject of these 4.
When an AI system makes a decision that matters, there is usually no way to check afterwards what it actually did. This records each decision so it can be independently verified later, without exposing the model itself.
Timesheets are just typed claims that nobody can check after the fact, so disputes about hours worked come down to trust in whichever party controls the record. There was no way to make a weekly time claim that was both unforgeable in its total and private until the person who made it chose to reveal part of it. This closes that gap by anchoring a fixed, 168-hour-bounded claim on chain and letting disclosure happen hour by hour, to whoever the holder picks.
Proving something existed and was signed at a certain time normally means publishing the thing itself. This puts only a hash on the chain and issues a certificate anyone can check, so the content stays private.
Signing a contract online today means trusting one company's database to say who signed, in what order, and when. If that company shuts down, gets bought, or gets compelled by a court, the "proof" you have is just whatever it says it is. This makes it possible for the proof of a signing to survive and be checked by anyone, long after the company that ran the signing is gone.
These are about something else, and deal with notarization and time on the way.
The blockchain can carry data as well as money, but data has to be attached to an output nobody can spend. This defines how to write such an output and the practices to follow when putting data in one.
Recording a long series of events on chain by chaining one transaction to the next gets expensive and slow. This describes carrying the same history as a chain of hashes inside a single transaction that keeps being updated instead.
Asking a wallet for activity within a date range means fetching everything and filtering it yourself. This adds a way to express the range in the request, without changing what comes back.
Committing to a piece of content along with what kind of thing it is usually means registering the type somewhere. This derives a single fixed-length commitment from the type and content directly, so no registry is needed.
If you hand someone a signed Bitcoin payment transaction but ask your wallet not to broadcast it yet, the wallet still locks away the coins it used, sometimes far more value than the payment itself, and there was no reliable way to get that value back if the other party never sends the transaction. An app-side timer does not help because it cannot undo a signature that already left the wallet. This leaves developers stuck choosing between reserving too much money indefinitely or giving up on delayed-send payment flows.
On BSV, the usual "spend after a certain block height" protections in Bitcoin scripts have been turned off, so there was no safe way to give one person a key that works right away and another person a key that only works after a deadline. Anyone trying to build this by hand could accidentally create a lock that looks safe but can actually be spent immediately, or one that can be used to jam the other party's ability to act before the deadline.
Sometimes a document should stay secret while its owner is alive and active, but come out automatically if that owner goes silent, like a journalist's files or a will. Before this, whoever held the decryption key could open the file whenever they liked, or lose it, and there was no way to tie "open it now" to a believable signal that the owner had actually stopped checking in. This makes it possible to split that trust across several people and have the release depend on an on-chain pattern of activity rather than on one person's word.
Concepts that keep appearing on the same standards as this one.
Search standards by number, title, author or topic