If that ever happens to you then document on a Blockchain that you have first-hand knowledge that someone has committed a crime against you, specifically 18 U.S. Code § 242. By not reporting a crime like that you could leave your fellow Americans exposed to a criminal by leaving that criminal undocumented. But, be very careful as in doing so you are liable for your spoken or written utterances.

  18 U.S. Code § 242 - Deprivation of rights under color of law 

  Whoever, under color of any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, willfully subjects any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or to different punishments, pains, or penalties, on account of such person being an alien, or by reason of his color, or race, than are prescribed for the punishment of citizens, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both [..]

  https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/242

▲ JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> document on a Blockchain that you have first-hand knowledge that someone has committed a crime against you

Farting into a wind is about as effective with the difference of being free.

If someone wants to actually fight this, a dash cam streaming somewhere offsite and secure (cloud is fine) is a million times more effective. It provides direct, court-admissible proof of the claim in a way a personal diary entry, in a notebook or on a blockchain, never could. Barring that, an audio recording on your phone. (Would check your state and local laws first, however.)

▲ jon128 5 hours ago | parent [-]

The Blockchain part is the for the notary part. No one is going to store a video file or the relevant PDF files of sworn testimony on a Blockchain itself, and an S3 bucket is fine of course ; I would have already thought this was extremely obvious.

The notary part is absolutely essential. Renowned Blockchains are the ULTIMATE for this use case. Sorry that you didn't already know this and the other part wasn't already obviously to be assumed by you.

I thought I was posting on a site called Hacker News, I was obviously being too assumptive. I'll spell things out more elaborately in comments in the future.

▲ bdamm 5 hours ago | parent [-]

A court could care less about blockchain hashes unless the society of lawyers and judges decide it is legitimate. Did they? Last I heard blockchain hashes were as useful as any random bunch of numbers on a printed page.

▲ jon128 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Notary service is an essential component to proceedings.

Courts have generally accepted proof of existence that is established by proper entries to robust distributed immutable ledgers.

More important than courts are the people. If someone many states over has a serious crime committed against them, and they want it to be known they have been wronged in some way, I and others have a moral right to know about it.

Those who know of an ill that has happened and choose to speak about it should be heard.

If someone provides testimony in the form of a video or a written statement, the files can be available over any medium such as torrent, R2 bucket, IPFS, what have you, but proof of existence on a blockchain for the authenticity aspect, "this exact thing identified by this sha512 hash submitted at this time" and unchangeable, is imperative.

The blockchain part is imperative so somebody can't "just go back and change something" post-facto.

If you want to see an example of a court action going a different way due to what was written to a robust distributed immutable ledger, do a web search for "Craig Wright is a fraud posted by private keys he said he owned".

That is the Satoshi Blockchain referenced to and swaying a court on a cosmic scale.

>> A court could care less about blockchain hashes unless the society of lawyers and judges decide it is legitimate.

Facts are not determined by loose consensus decided by private societies. The standard is higher. Such private societies are also not a substitute for the legislature, nor could they be for determining a true fact.

Blockchains and their contents are rooted in math so they're not trivial to argue with. USA is rife with academia suitable to provide abundant expert witnesses for said math.

>> A court could care less about blockchain hashes

In practice this would lead to the case being escalated to a higher court. Or worse a federal lawsuit could be filed against a judge, which is not unheard of.

Judges aren't cosmically ultimate arbiters, they take an oath and have a duty and like anyone else who does, they are subject to rules and regulations for which there are real consequences for failure to abide by.

▲ bdamm 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I understand where you're coming from, but until the math is accepted by a court and a procedure for validating authenticty is established within the society of judges, the burden for introducing this kind of evidence falls on whomever decides it is essential enough for their case to succeed. That's a very expensive proposition, so you can't really say that it is the process until a plaintiff or defendent with large enough pockets to afford the conversion of the legal society takes up the cause. Until then it's just random gibberish, and unavailable to the average person as a court admissible statement of authenticty for a digital artifact. The fact is that the "loose consensus" of "private societies" DOES determine acceptability, when that private society is the law society. Judges are only subject to the rules and regulations that other judges and prosecuters decide apply. There's nothing cosmic about it - it is very much rooted in the people who apply the law.

▲ jon128 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The case that Craig Wright lost was years ago. The evidence that was posted to the Satoshi Blockchain was recognized by the court.

It's already happened.

>> Judges are only subject to the rules and regulations that other judges and prosecuters decide apply.

The last thing a state judge wants is a federal lawsuit against him where a federal judge reviews accusations that he/she didn't follow essential procedure.

>> it's just random gibberish

The plentiful expert witnesses from math departments and computer science departments from Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and the like who will gladly show up to defend their fields (albeit will want to be paid), would say otherwise, if that were necessary, which it's not, because like has already been pointed out at least twice now

  it already happened.

	▲	bdamm 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I researched your claim as best I could, and I did not find any evidence that the Craig Wright case hinged in any way on the on-chain events. The UK high court appears to have accepted other forensic evidence that he fraudulently produced documentation. However, there are many cases that DO use blockchain events. Transferring the blockchain event into court admissible evidence is not at all straightforward, but some jurisdictions have established standards for how to do it. This comes up especially often in inheritance cases. See: https://truescreen.io/articles/blockchain-evidence-court-adm... It has been an interesting rabbit hole. Notably, on-chain evidence is only one of many different kinds of evidence that courts will accept, so focusing entirely on this mechanism to the exclusion of all others is not so helpful. Transferring on-chain events into a winnable court case can be a fairly expensive way to establish facts.

▲ nilamo 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> If that ever happens to you then document on a Blockchain

?? just any random blockchain? In what way does that help? Also, how? Are you buying small batches of bitcoin to spell a message out using morse code or something? Or is this an Etherium contract that does...?

▲ jon128 5 hours ago | parent [-]

[dead]

▲ wyre 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I could be projecting, but I think a lot of people here don't have a deep understanding of blockchains because the past 15 years has been full of crypto scams and would rather put their time, energy, and attention into better technologies. Proof of existence is the first real utility for bitcoin besides as an investment vehicle or decentralized transfer of money, so I think it's fair that other's would want to know how it works.

▲

jon128 5 hours ago | parent [-]

More Americans get their understanding of the world from TV tier media than reading original sources.

Both for technology and law.

Illiteracy is rampant.

Critical thinking is oddly uncommon.

It's unfortunate and unsustainable.

	▲	DeluluDon 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's extremely bad here, including expectations of others.

▲ nilamo 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> It's called a SHA512 hash or a SHA256 hash. You're posting on a site called "Hacker News", if you aren't already familiar with SHA512 and or at least SHA256 you should probably be just a little bit embarrassed.

lmao the absolute nerve of saying I should be embarrassed for not already knowing about some weird side purpose you're using a blockchain for.

Has this ever actually been used for anything legal? This feels like it'd be tossed out of court for being too ridiculous. "It's proof because I said it's proof, and you have to trust me on that mr judge"

▲ thinkmassive 33 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I had difficulty understanding the point of that new account's long-winded comments, but they might be referring to using a blockchain for timestamping purposes.

See https://opentimestamps.org/

▲ jon128 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>> Has this ever actually been used for anything legal?

See the cases by/against Craig Wright who falsely claimed to be the originator of Bitcoin and not a mere contributor (and whether he made contributions that made a real impact is also in question). The Blockchain provided mathematical proof that Craig Wright is a fraud. The very private key Wright claimed to own was used to post on the Satoshi Blockchain: "Craig Wright is a fraud" which absolutely nuked Wright in court.

So, yes, in the biggest way possibly possible on a cosmic scale.

Proof of Existence has been used for evidence in courts for much less interesting things. It's been old news for a while now.

>> "It's proof because I said it's proof, and you have to trust me on that mr judge"

This objectively tells everyone reading this you don't already comprehend what SHA256 and SHA512 are, which is what you should be embarrassed of.

Not the part that these hashes posted alongside filenames of their respective files on the Satoshi Blockchain has been used for real-world applications for over a decade, which you should have uncovered in a web search I suggested you do in my previous comment, which you obviously did not do.

It's fine, everyone has to start somewhere. And you learned something today, unless this discussion has rustled your jimmies such that this opportunity for your learning and improvement is self-blocked, which given this is "Hacker News" and not Facebook, and we are total strangers to each other, would be even more embarrassing...

I will save this thread as a PDF and put the PDF's sha512 hash on the Satoshi Blockchain so that everyone for all eternity can know at around this time you posted dumb things in an arrogant manner on this thread.

You are living in a Blockchain era. This is how powerful Blockchains really are. Neat how that works innit.

▲ nilamo 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> I will save this thread as a PDF and put the PDF's sha512 hash on the Satoshi Blockchain so that everyone for all eternity can know at around this time you posted dumb things in an arrogant manner on this thread.

Well hang on now, because it sounds like you don't know what a one-way hash is. If you put the hash on the blockchain, no one except you will be able to read the pdf. Because the hash isn't anything except a hash, and cannot be unwound to create the pdf. So nothing would be recorded for all time, except a random string that means something to you, and only to you.

▲ jon128 5 hours ago | parent [-]

<3

The file itself will be available on IPFS and will be posted in an S3 or similar bucket. I'll make a torrent too.

  cat  ./file  ./salt    |    shasum -a 512

	▲	ImPostingOnHN 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		thank you for your explanations how can we verify that a file was not altered before checksumming and uploading it?

▲ NikolaNovak 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

... why the blockchain? And which one? That seems a needless techno-complication, especially if you're trying to spread this advice wide.

	▲	jon128 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		See `https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50264113`