Could the Bitcoin network be used as an ultrasecure notary service?

Manuel Araoz, a 23-year-old developer in Argentina, has an idea for Bitcoin that doesn't focus on money.

Araoz, who works in game development, launched a service this week called Proof of Existence. It's essentially a notary public service on the Internet, an inexpensive way of using Bitcoin's distributed computing power to allow people to verify that a document existed at a certain point in time.

Araoz envisions it as a way to fight efforts to distort or lie about data. "My idea was to give journalists or private statistical agencies the ability to certify data at a certain point in time. If someone denies the data, you have something that proves the data existed," he said.

The Bitcoin system uses a distributed computing network to transfer the virtual currency from computer to computer. Part of the system involves "miners," or computers that cryptographically verify those transactions, which are entered into a public ledger called the "blockchain".

The strength of the blockchain lies in the fact that no single entity controls it. Instead, computers around the world repeatedly verify its integrity, making it a trustworthy, multi-gigabyte ledger based on public key cryptography.

"I always liked the idea of proving a document's integrity by a cryptographic hash," Araoz said in a phone interview from Buenos Aires. The problem, Araoz said, is that you don't know when a document was created. - Read more here: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2039705/could-the-bitcoin-network-be-used-as-an-ultrasecure-notary-service.html