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pkt / Peter Todd
npub1ej4…ndrm
2025-02-22 20:30:05

pkt on Nostr: Good news: Simple Proof has promised me an initial $20k of funding to work on ...

Good news: Simple Proof has promised me an initial $20k of funding to work on OpenTimestamps.

So far I've partially fixed the scaling issue. I rewrote Riccardo Cassata's Foxglove timestamp request aggregator in modern Rust (the previous version didn't even compile anymore).

https://github.com/opentimestamps/foxglove

Foxglove is now running live on both my Alice and Bob calendars.

This means that I can now scale timestamp _creation_ by throwing servers at the problem. So if someone tries to DoS attack the OpenTimestamps calendars, given enough money to run extra servers, you'll (probably) at least be able to create new time-stamps.

Timestamp _verification_ still has a significant scaling problem that needs to be fixed, and this will be a significantly harder challenge to implement. But I'm making progress at least.

Re: the OpenTimestamps grant request, the problem is right now while the protocol scales in theory, the backend does not. It would be quite easy for a bad actor to DoS attack OpenTimestamps out of existence because I simply can't throw servers at the problem: the backend code just doesn't scale.

I need funding to put in a bunch of hours to fix this. So far, no luck in finding that; OpenSats is one of a few sources I've tried.

Frankly, I suspect that there isn't actually much interest in time-stamping.

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