Verified, unalterable historical record via blockchain? may already exist?

[arklan]

so, just kinda throwing this out there. it's probably already being done, i'm no professional, totally pulling this out of thin air, etc, but figured we could talk about it. maybe you guys know of something already in the works i can look at or something.

as we all know, the BTC blockchain gives us a record of every transaction that's ever happened and it more or less can't be altered. more accurately, it grows increasingly hard to alter the longer it exists, i suppose.

well, enter orwell's 1984, fake news, photoshop, deep fakes, etc.

there's a need for a verifiable, unalterable record of ...well, everything. history itself. it sort of already exists in the internet itself - nothing ever really gets deleted, right? but that's kind of ad hoc and random and really difficult to track down when it could be urgent. ideally we'd have something that could be referenced in courts, in politics, as absolute irrefutable, unarguable, hard fact. "at this time, in this place, this thing happened." full stop, period, end of.

no more editing someone out of a photo with a leader, like the soviets famously did. sure they could edit the photo and share it like it was the original, but then someone comes along and shows, nope, that's fake, and here's the proof. a hard record of fact checking, basically.

i'm not exactly sure on HOW this would work mind you - is it some sort of bot scraping articles for dates, events, pictures and video? well if so, how do we know the articles are posting real things, and not, say, the onion and it's satire?

and obviously there's issues with why would people bother to mine it and build the blockchain - i don't mean this as some kind of "TruthCoin" - not to mention who'd manage it to determine what goes into the record.

and it also obviously couldn't verify any event that happened before it was activated. you'd have to start from zero, really, just like BTC's value...

anyway - you get the idea. a record, via blockchain, that's about factual events and proves they happened and can't be altered.

can it be done? is it being done? SHOULD it be done? how could it be done?

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[pooya87]

you want a distributed and  immutable ledger.
there are two problems that your idea is facing. first is that the size of such ledger is going to grow real fast. you want to store "everything"! so it obviously needs a gigantic space to store all of this data. and the only way it could be immutable is if it is stored in a decentralized way by many people. and because of the size it will be limited to only big servers.
the other problem is that if you choose "blockchain technology" you would want to secure this chain with cryptography. for example bitcoin's blockchain is immutable because it costs millions of dollars to reverse the most recent block and the cost increases a lot faster as the block becomes older (deeper in the chain). it is like this because there is a huge computing power going into mining bitcoin blocks and it is so because of the incentive. what kind of incentive is your idea going to give those who mine such blockchain?

[arklan]

as i already stated - i haven't the foggiest idea how to encourage people to mine it. that's kinda why i posted - to discuss it with people smarter than i am and figure out if it's even possible.

as the the storage issue - yep. it's a problem, and a big one. in theory you could do something like a hash algorithm and store THAT rather than the original article/video? like, you have an article from the new york times. you take the article, hash it, store the cash in the "history blockchain" (for lack of a better term...) and then, when someone wants to verify the article is unaltered, they grab it from the website, run the hashing algo, and verify the results match.

we'd be storing the tiny 100 character hash, not the original article/video/whatever.

at least i think that's how such algo's work, or can work anyway. i've seen a script for windows powershell to compare files to check for changes as part of version control software at a place i used to work. this was, very roughly, what was going on.

[pooya87]

as the the storage issue - yep. it's a problem, and a big one. in theory you could do something like a hash algorithm and store THAT rather than the original article/video? like, you have an article from the new york times. you take the article, hash it, store the cash in the "history blockchain" (for lack of a better term...) and then, when someone wants to verify the article is unaltered, they grab it from the website, run the hashing algo, and verify the results match.

this could work but the size is still an issue. even though this would make the database a lot smaller than storing the data itself, but it still is going to be a big database.
and it can only be used to verify whether the content was modified or not. it won't be able to show what the modification was. for example it could simply be an edit fixing a mistake (a typo in the article), or any change in the html of the site would result in an entirely different hash. so it won't be "unalterable historical record".

we'd be storing the tiny 100 character hash, not the original article/video/whatever.

the most commonly used hash algorithms nowadays are 256 bit like SHA256 that bitcoin uses, so the result is 256 bit or 32 bytes (if you look at it in hex it will be 64 characters, although you store bytes not strings).

[joniboini]

as i already stated - i haven't the foggiest idea how to encourage people to mine it. that's kinda why i posted - to discuss it with people smarter than i am and figure out if it's even possible.

Money is obviously the answer. You need a ton of money to work that out.

The only one who can run this project is probably those with unlimited wealth, such as government agencies or something similar.

[Harlot]

and obviously there's issues with why would people bother to mine it and build the blockchain - i don't mean this as some kind of "TruthCoin" - not to mention who'd manage it to determine what goes into the record.

It's seems like you are building this thought on the assumption of that everything that has blockchain requires a certain type of cryptocurrency to function and put on transactions and records to it. Well it's not the case and not all blockchain has cryptocurrencies involved more specifically the ones that are created by companies who just want to take advantage of blockchain technology. So the "mining" process you might be talking about will not be mined by us but the ones who are running the process which in your case is like an archive for the history which I think for most of the countries will be handled by the government.

[hatshepsut93]

i'm not exactly sure on HOW this would work mind you - is it some sort of bot scraping articles for dates, events, pictures and video? well if so, how do we know the articles are posting real things, and not, say, the onion and it's satire?

You can't, you'd need trusted human input for that. At best your project could be a decentralized alternative for archiving sites, but I'm sure someone has already tried it, so you may want to do some research and check if they succeed or not, and what's the current state of such projects.

As for fakes, I believe that they can be combated with the same technology that creates them - machine learning. If you can teach neural network to imitate something, you can also teach it to spot all those artifacts and other patterns that are present in fake photos and videos. As for articles, there's also neural networks that do sentiment analysis and can spot manipulative articles with some accuracy.

[arklan]

and it can only be used to verify whether the content was modified or not. it won't be able to show what the modification was. for example it could simply be an edit fixing a mistake (a typo in the article), or any change in the html of the site would result in an entirely different hash. so it won't be "unalterable historical record".

ah. right. hmm. good point.

i'm not exactly sure on HOW this would work mind you - is it some sort of bot scraping articles for dates, events, pictures and video? well if so, how do we know the articles are posting real things, and not, say, the onion and it's satire?

You can't, you'd need trusted human input for that. At best your project could be a decentralized alternative for archiving sites, but I'm sure someone has already tried it, so you may want to do some research and check if they succeed or not, and what's the current state of such projects.

As for fakes, I believe that they can be combated with the same technology that creates them - machine learning. If you can teach neural network to imitate something, you can also teach it to spot all those artifacts and other patterns that are present in fake photos and videos. As for articles, there's also neural networks that do sentiment analysis and can spot manipulative articles with some accuracy.

ugh... another good point.

as should be no shock to anyone here, i need to do a lot more research.

i kinda figured someone would have already heard of something like this and point me to it or just blow it full of holes right away. guess it was kinda a middle ground.

yea, the already existing archiving sites largely do this... maybe the route to take is speak with them about implmenting blockchain to prove their archives are genuine or something? i don't know.

bleh.