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A comment on Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what changes would you make?.

Re:Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what chang... by holomorphically on Saturday October 30, 2021 @08:10PM (#29053347)
Cryptographic identity verification and trusted clocks. As in, cryptography would be built-in and everyone would have a set of keys that they could use to verify ownership of digital content by using cryptographic signatures and timestamps.
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Re:Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what chang... by liveoneggs on Saturday October 30, 2021 @09:03PM (#29053618)
how would you get those trusted clocks to agree with each other?
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Re:Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what chang... by holomorphically on Saturday October 30, 2021 @09:08PM (#29053644)
Through a synchronization protocol but it's obviously impossible to have perfectly synchronized clocks so the safest thing to do would be to use several timestamps from several clocks.

Blockchains in a way are such clocks where the ordering of the blocks on the chain provide an implicit counter. But blockchains have too much overhead so by assuming some trust it would be possible to get rid of the proof of work mechanism and just use a signed timestamp from a trusted source.

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Re:Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what chang... by yjftsjthsd-h on Saturday October 30, 2021 @10:35PM (#29054002)
How is that different from the existing ntp infrastructure, which already supports encryption, integrity, and stratum one time servers?
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Re:Ask HN: If the Internet were redesigned today, what chang... by holomorphically on Saturday October 30, 2021 @11:21PM (#29054185)
Can I send a hash of some content and then get a signed response from the ntp server with a timestamp?
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