Proof Of Light
All companies and brands that settle in Ikia will be able to provide products to their existing and new customers. Proving the ownership and origin of physical assets has never been easy.
Digital assets create an additional complexity. Because digital assets can be copied and transmitted so easily, it is often virtually impossible to prove their origin or provenance. Luckily, blockchain technology is now providing a practical method of proving the existence, origin and complete derivation of digital assets.
You may have seen a movie or heard a story about a kidnap victim whose family asks for a “proof of life”. The proof is typically a photograph of the victim posed with a current newspaper. The photo proves the person was alive and in the possession of the kidnappers on a certain date.
Blockchain technology is now allowing us to provide similar proofs for the existence of digital assets. The immutable nature of the blockchain — the fact that it is impossible to overwrite time-stamped blockchain ledger entries — allows us to create “proof of existence” entries for digital assets.
Simplistically, such a system works by inserting a cryptographic hash into the blockchain ledger. A cryptographic hash can be thought of as a digital fingerprint for a document. The chance of documents having the same hash is infinitesimally small — there are more possible hash values in a 256-bit hash than there are nanoseconds since the Big Bang! So by placing a cryptographic hash of a document on the blockchain, we have definitive proof that the document existed at the time of the blockchain entry.
Cryptographic proofs are all very well for mathematicians and computer scientists, but would they hold up in a court of law? At the moment, the situation resembles the early days of DNA profiling. Very few people understand the molecular structure of DNA, and similarly, only a relatively small subsection of the community have a deep understanding of cryptographic hashing. Nevertheless, just as the solid scientific basis for DNA profiling eventually led to acceptance of its legal validity, there are early signs that blockchain proofs will one day be accepted as legal proofs.