A comic from Ink Factory showing how the Bitstamped app might have helped the founding of Facebook
The Bitstamped app uses Bitcoin’s security to offer time-stamping of documents.
Ink Factory stated that it believes the application, Bitstamped, is the “first non-currency application of Bitcoin technology”, with the cloud-based service allowing users to time-stamp documents through Bitcoin’s Blockchain – an online record – as well as a printable stamp “to prove the date a document first existed”.
The “publicly verifiable” time-stamps are designed for “mainstream use”, and can be paid for with a credit card, so users “don’t need to know what Bitcoin is to use the service”. Uses for the technology include time-stamping photographic evidence, helping to “establish prior rights in business disputes”, and “deterring plagiarism of documents”.
The system works by calculating a “cryptographic fingerprint or signature” for a file, with that signature included in a Bitcoin transaction to “save it” on the aforementioned Blockchain – meaning that, “at any time, as long as the user has the original file, the signature can be calculated and proven to match the one that was Bitstamped”.
Ink Factory said that it had found it was possible to “generate a small Bitcoin transaction” into which the data can be embedded, with the transaction marking the small payment “un-spendable”, so that the transaction – through Bitcoin’s methodology of other users “mining” – would “actually [add] value” to the currency.
Tim Johnson, Managing Director of the company, stated: “The business has been accepting Bitcoin as a payment method for more than six months, but UK Bitcoin customers are few and far.But I think the most truly disruptive aspect of Bitcoin is the Blockchain – the distributed ledger that tracks all Bitcoin transactions.
“We wondered: what if we could store information in a Bitcoin transaction – a transaction that cannot be back-dated, post-edited or disputed? It turns out we weren’t the first to think of time-stamping checksums on the Blockchain, but we’ve taken the idea a step further, building on existing technologies to offer a stamp that customers can add to the footer of a printed document which when scanned will open a page that verifies when it was Bitstamped and proves the file must have existed at that time.”
Ink Factory was one of the first industry companies to offer Bitcoin as a payment method late last year, and Johnson spoke to The Recycler for a feature about Bitcoin in issue 256 this year. Last month, he set out his belief that the future of Bitcoin in retail has been “overstated”, though the company still offers it as a payment method.