The crucial role of timestamps in blockchain technology
Including traceable and accurate timestamps in a hash ledger strengthens the immutability of the technology ensuring secure and indisputable verification during cybersecurity investigations and crypto trading audits.
Hash ledger technology primarily focuses on the immutability and integrity of data through the use of hash functions. It involves generating unique hash codes for data entries, including financial transactions such as cryptocurrency trading, and linking them in a chain-like structure. It is crucial for these ledger entries to be immutable, meaning they cannot be manipulated at a later stage.
Blockchain is a prominent example of hash ledger technology. Hash ledgers for NFT and crypto currency trading, rely on the fundamental principle of immutability achieved through the utilisation of hash chains. Generating hashes is a straightforward process, but it is practically impossible to retrieve the original ledger entry from the hash code alone.
The secret of a hash ledger is that you include the previous hash code with each ledger entry. Then, if the distributed hash ledger entries are re-ordered, or one is deleted or inserted, the hash codes will not match up. The system allows you to identify if the sequence of ledger entries has been preserved.
There are two problems with this approach.
First, there is nothing to prevent you changing the digital or distributed ledger entries and then rewriting all the hashes so they are correct. The solution to this is to cross-publish hash codes to other digital or distributed ledgers – or even print them occasionally in a newspaper – in order to prevent this from being possible.
The second problem is that only the sequence of events is preserved, but not the actual time of the events. You don’t know exactly when anything happened, and, potentially, across distributed ledgers, which event happened first. If you want to understand causality, i.e. which event caused another, or prove a transaction is correctly logged, the event must be traceably, accurately and precisely timestamped.
That’s where the traceable time feed comes in. By including timestamps regularly in the ledger, for example once per second or once per minute, the immutability is reinforced and you can prove with confidence exactly when events happened.
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