Steren's labs

Here is a small but powerful idea I recently helped to concretise: How to prove you created something before somebody else?Priority statement can be as simple as hashing your document and storing it in a bank transfer. As an inventor, author, artist, scientist or other creator, you may fear that distributing your work creates a risk that others replace or deny your authorship. Here is a simple solution to this problem:

Compute a cryptographic fingerprint from a document and copy it to the text fields of a bank transfer. With such a fingerprint (hash value) stored at a bank there is evidence of the existence of the content of a document at a certain point in time. This can be used to e.g. support a proof of priority. I helped the inventor of this idea, Ralf, by setting up a simple landing page explaining the idea, by implementing an online version and by broadcasting the message in some online communities. You can visit the landing page at this address. We tried to be as simpel as possible while still explaining how and why it works. I created an online application that is performing a hash computation of a document and outputs the results ready to be copied in a bank statement. It is available online and as an offline Chrome app. It was my first Chrome packaged app, it is very pleasant to create simple desktop applications using web technologies and to be able to distribute it so easily. We had great feedback from Reddit’s /r/legal and /r/crypto communities. But the most interesting discussions came from HackerNews. The main feedback was regarding the Bitcoin cryptocurrency: Instead of storing the hash in a bank statement, the Bitcoin blockchain could be used. We thus wanted to keep things as simple and trustable as possible to understand for the end user. A bank statement goes more into this direction. I hope this idea can spread and be useful to you or people you know.