Proof-of-concept developed at the Barclay's Distributed Banking Hackathon to ensure the uniqueness of data published under a topic using proof-of-publication and the Bitcoin blockchain. For instance, a bank could use this technology to allow third-parties to be confident that accounting records they were relying on were accurate and no conflicting versions of those records existed. Or Tor could use this tool to allow Tor users to be sure the version of Tor they were using was the same version everyone else was using and they weren't being personally targetted with malware. Or this principle can also be used as the basis for a certificate transparency scheme.
Uniquebits publishes hashes of data, signed by PGP signatures, on the Bitcoin blockchain encoded into transactions. Each hash is associated with a specific topic. By scanning the blockchain the complete set of all published hashes from a given pubkey for a given topic can be obtained. Third-parties relying on that data can then check their copy against the published hashes. Missing records are immediately apparent, possibly indicating fraud. (e.g. a bank attempting to keep two sets of books)
Note that the PGP signatures are essential! Simply publishing the hashes themselves is not sufficient - that's timestamping rather than proof-of-publication, and only proves that data existed prior to some time; timestamping says nothing about whether or not conflicting versions of the data exist. Unfortunately there is a tremendous amount of misinformation out there regarding this point. Secondly it is not possible to trustlessly outsource this publication, for example with Factom's merkle tree scheme. If your protocol involves a third-party in the publication that third-party can put you in a position of being unable to prove you did not commit fraud as you can't control what publications they make on your behalf.
./unibits --regtest publish 37EC7D7B0A217CDB4B4E007E7FAB114267E4FA04 hi deadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeefdeadbeefdeadbefe
./unibits -v --regtest scan --height 1 37EC7D7B0A217CDB4B4E007E7FAB114267E4FA04
WARNING: don't use this on mainnet/testnet! python-gnupg may have a remotely exploitable bug in it; need to switch to using Isis's fork:
https://github.com/isislovecruft/python-gnupg
python3-gnupg python-bitcoinlib v0.2.1
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Use blockpop for anti-censorship
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Use committed encryption keys for anti-censorship. Basically publication p_i should commit to encryption key k_i+1, which is used to encrypt publication p_i+1 As miners don't know that key, they can't censor the next publication, however revealing that key still allows anyone to securely verify the next publication.
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Provide the option of publishing via a merkle binary prefix tree to combine multiple publications into one.
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Use Isis's python3-gnupg
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Make into library
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etc. etc.