constant on Nostr: Timestamps only give very weak indications of truth; but they are really good at ...
Timestamps only give very weak indications of truth; but they are really good at catching certain lies.
Take for example the following note:
your client may have a hard time loading it, depending on when you look at this post. This is because the event claims to be signed at Thu Oct 17 2024 03:00:00 GMT. Given it is currently Oct 12, this is a blatant lie, and relays tend to not accept this event because of this.
But, what happens in 5 days? As soon we pass that 3 o’clock mark on oct 17, how would any outsider know that this event was not signed at that time, but 5 days earlier? It is easy to catch these sort of lies when you are present in real time and pay attention, but if you arrive after the fact, NIP-03 timestamps allow you to identify such a lie for certain if adequate proof exists.
And in this case, this proof does exist! Because I timestamped this event already, tying it into block 865274, which was mined around 05:31, oct 12. Which results in the following screenshot of Amethyst:
The app claims the event was posted ‘now’ (probably because it simply interprets any date in the future as ‘now’), but also tells me a timestamp exists that is 9 hours old.
Now this particular type of lying (pretending to be in the future), it not all that interesting, I was just curious. But it does go to show that you should not trust the time the event claims it was signed, because it is trivially easy to lie about it.
Say hello to my fren btw:
Take for example the following note:
quoting nevent1q…gvfghello from october 17 2024
your client may have a hard time loading it, depending on when you look at this post. This is because the event claims to be signed at Thu Oct 17 2024 03:00:00 GMT. Given it is currently Oct 12, this is a blatant lie, and relays tend to not accept this event because of this.
But, what happens in 5 days? As soon we pass that 3 o’clock mark on oct 17, how would any outsider know that this event was not signed at that time, but 5 days earlier? It is easy to catch these sort of lies when you are present in real time and pay attention, but if you arrive after the fact, NIP-03 timestamps allow you to identify such a lie for certain if adequate proof exists.
And in this case, this proof does exist! Because I timestamped this event already, tying it into block 865274, which was mined around 05:31, oct 12. Which results in the following screenshot of Amethyst:
The app claims the event was posted ‘now’ (probably because it simply interprets any date in the future as ‘now’), but also tells me a timestamp exists that is 9 hours old.
Now this particular type of lying (pretending to be in the future), it not all that interesting, I was just curious. But it does go to show that you should not trust the time the event claims it was signed, because it is trivially easy to lie about it.
Say hello to my fren btw: