Blockchain as a forensic evidence trail

As a public, permanent timestamp server, Bitcoin can record anything: Emails sent, documents signed, papers and articles published.

It means whenever

Written by

Richard Boase

Published On

09 Nov 2022

Imagine a world where all of your Internet traffic is routed over the blockchain. Where every payment, no matter what currency it’s in is recorded with a single hash on chain. In the future, that’s exactly where we’re going.

What makes BSV blockchain ideal for use as global forensic evidence

Economy of scale

The BSV blockchain gets cheaper to use as it gets bigger, which is the characteristic function of any economy of scale. BSV blockchain ‘scales’, and as it does so, it collects more and more hashes about events happening in the real world.

A public, permanent timestamp server

As a public, permanent timestamp server, Bitcoin can record anything: Emails sent, documents signed, papers and articles published. It means whenever we do something online in future, we’ll always be able to point back to the moment we did it, and compare the public hash on chain with the paper we published, the email we sent, or the document we signed, to see if it’s a match. If it matches, it verifies what we did. If it doesn’t match, then the document, email or contract we’re comparing, has been changed.

Data integrity

This process, at scale, will make everything more secure. It means data produced at source can be verified by Machine Learning algorithms and AIs as having been unchanged since the point of origin, which in turn will lead to a more efficient and more streamlined economy.

Information security

It will mean hackers won’t be able to delete their logs when they penetrate corporate systems, and it means lawyers in disputes will be able to point to a cast-iron timestamp of events in the past that paints an accurate story of any contracts written, sent and signed, and provably show the order of events as they happened.

This is the value proposition that the blockchain, at scale, offers. It’s the same security system that underpins Bitcoin, applied to everything on the network, and it’s secured by large, industrial miners, who can be identified, checked, audited and regulated in the normal way, and these miners compete against each other to drive the price of a single timestamp down.

Eventually, these timestamps will be applied to everything you can think of, and all on a single public system.

Bitcoin’s utility as a commodity

Micropayment business models

If we think about the design of Bitcoin, the commodity, it’s easy to understand why. The most widely used form of money must be the most efficient. In Bitcoin, that means it must be the result of miners offering bigger and bigger blocks to the market, to drive transaction fees down. As fees decrease, the price of a hash necessarily decreases, meaning more and more micropayments businesses can launch, selling more and more data products at a higher rate, and a lower price.

Forensic evidence

The product of any blockchain is ultimately the humble hash, the unalterable timestamp, hashed into the chain of previous timestamps so that no previous hash can change, without changing every hash after it.

In court cases like the one in Norway, where Dr Craig Wright faced the notorious Twitter troll ‘Hodlonaut’ ( a cartoon space cat with a thirst for libellous bullying), the cat’s lawyers depended heavily on forensic evidence like hashes of documents like the Bitcoin Whitepaper.

The problem is, there was no chain of custody of that evidence. No public timestamp server existed back in 2008-2009 that would allow a court or forensic examiner to determine that the documents presented by the plaintiff were the same as documents published by Satoshi Nakamoto. But of course, it didn’t! That was the problem that Bitcoin was born to solve.

Fundamentally: ‘How can we keep an accurate record of the past?’

Satoshi Nakamoto’s (Dr Craig Wright) invention would have saved the day if only the judge had sought to understand.

Blockchain for reliable record-keeping

Bitcoin is, at its heart, a security system that can defend honest people against libel and defamation, fraud, and hacking attacks, especially those that involve courts and judges. It’s an economic security system and the platform on which we can dependably build the future of money, business and commerce, education and justice.

The blockchain will, by its very nature, bring down costs, increase economic security, and bring wealth to a billion disenfranchised people at the bottom of society.

As such, it’s an invention to be cherished and protected in its original format, the ticker now known as ‘BSV’ or BSV blockchain.

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