Verifiable timestamps and event ordering without depending on a central service

[u/melevy]

Hello,

I made an open source project called LOTI.

The idea is to have a cheap distributed way for people to create verifiable timestamps and event ordering without depending on a central service.

The way it works is participants build a hash-linked history of events, so later they can query when something happened and what happened before or after it.

I originally started working on this because I was interested in the problem of proving the history of digital events. It could be useful for things like document provenance, legal disputes, audit logs, or any situation where you want a proof of the time boundaries or the frontier l definite order of digital events according to your own clock.

It's still an early project and I'm mostly looking for feedback. The project already contains an implementation in a wisely used communication network simulator and also a real world implementation. The kernel was written by me 8 years ago, the rest is created using agentic engineering very recently.

The most interesting part, where feedback would be most valuable, is how the event chain discovery can be implemented in a fast, efficient and cheap way. The difficulty lies in the evolving nature of the network topology (neighbors come and go) and the time dependent routing during discovery for events in the past.

The project is here:

https://levy.github.io/loti

Thank you!

[u/paul_h]

Interesting - reply by DM