How OpenTimestamps ‘Carbon Dated’ (almost) The Entire Internet With One Bitcoin Transaction
As we all know the Australian scammer Craig Wright produced a similar PGP message with a fake backdated PGP key. We know that key is a fake for a lot of reasons, including the fact that it doesn’t match the Wayback Machine’s Jan 2011 snapshot of bitcoin.org.
And yes, I signed that message with a different key too. But I have an explanation: you see, I stored all the Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym stuff on a MicroSD card, which I lost in a tragic house fire right after Gavin visited the CIA. But you see, I actually had to delay the publication of Bitcoin a few months when I realised I needed to add smart contracts to it, and I just found a backup from that attempt. I uploaded it to the Internet Archive a few months prior to releasing Bitcoin:
By consistently timestamping all Internet Archive content, we make attacks like the above easy to detect. The OpenTimestamps proofs we’ve generated are traceable back to the Bitcoin blockchain, a widely witnessed data structure with timestamps that can’t be backdated. Even with a sysadmin’s help, the best the attacker could do is create a modified file that’s very suspiciously missing a timestamp that all other files have.