Humanity has evolved to detect counterfeit or falsified documents, and human scheming in the real world. But we lack the sensors to detect this criminal energy in the digital world. Fortunately, human ingenuity has always helped us create tools.
The tool at hand here:
efficient and reliable timestamping!
Determining whether an individual or organisation deserves trust has always been hard. How then do you know whether a timestamper is trustworthy?
The revolutionary idea behind Zeitgitter is that you don’t. And don’t have to. Because all timestampers will continuously observe each other, already a single trustworthy timestamper guarantees that everybody else has to obey the rules. → Weiter [Wie es funktioniert]
Timestamping does not prevent anybody from willfully preparing and then submitting false information. However, it allows crystal-clear identification of after-the fact manipulations: It prevents the researcher from retroactively suppressing measurements not supporting his pet theory or the accountant from changing his books to hide his embezzlement. To achieve a trustworthy process, other means like trust, control, and double-checking at the time of data entry still need to be in place.