opentimestamps-client mit Homebrew, Nix installieren

Projektlinks

• Homepage

Befehle und Aliase

• ots-git-gpg-wrapper

Projektgeschichte

Peter Todd announced OpenTimestamps in September 2016 as a scalable, trust-minimized, distributed timestamping scheme using Bitcoin. The design separates the timestamp proof format from any single web service: calendars aggregate commitments, Bitcoin supplies the public time attestation, and clients can later verify proofs against the blockchain.

The client repository packages the everyday tooling around that protocol: stamping files, upgrading pending timestamps, verifying proofs, and integrating timestamps into PGP-signed Git commits. The Git integration work targeted a software-supply-chain problem: a commit signature proves who signed a commit, while a timestamp helps show when that signature existed.

Adoptionsgeschichte

OpenTimestamps appealed to users who wanted blockchain-backed proof-of-existence without putting whole documents on-chain or trusting a single timestamping authority. Public calendar servers made ordinary timestamp creation cheap and fast, while local verification with Bitcoin Core kept the trust model understandable for security-sensitive users.

The client remained niche compared with general signing tools, but it developed a small ecosystem of protocol implementations in Python, JavaScript, Java, and Rust. Its strongest adoption story is in release engineering, archival proof, research-notebook integrity, and Git-history timestamping rather than broad consumer file sharing.

Wie es verwendet wird

Users run commands such as `ots stamp`, `ots verify`, and Git wrapper commands to create proof files, complete pending attestations, and check that a file or commit existed before a Bitcoin block time. Verification can use a local Bitcoin Core node, including a pruned node, so the proof does not depend on the original calendar server staying online.

The package’s `ots-git-gpg-wrapper` executable is especially package-nerdy: it composes Git signing, GPG signatures, and timestamp proofs so release commits can carry both identity and time evidence.

Warum Paket-Nerds sich dafür interessieren

This package sits at the intersection of packaging, cryptography, and reproducible provenance. It is small, but it gives maintainers a way to attach time evidence to source releases, commits, and artifacts without inventing a full transparency log.

Zeitleiste

• 2016-09: OpenTimestamps was announced as a Bitcoin-backed timestamping protocol.
• 2016-09: Git integration was documented as a way to timestamp PGP-signed commits.
• 2020s: client release notes continued to refine Git extraction, cache locations, timestamp display precision, and verification behavior.

Related projects

• Related projects include opentimestamps-server for calendar services, python-opentimestamps for protocol primitives, java-opentimestamps, javascript-opentimestamps, Bitcoin Core, GnuPG, and Git.

Quellen

• https://github.com/opentimestamps/opentimestamps-client
• https://github.com/opentimestamps/opentimestamps-client/blob/master/doc/git-integration.md
• https://github.com/opentimestamps/opentimestamps-client/blob/master/release-notes.md
• https://opentimestamps.org/
• https://petertodd.org/2016/opentimestamps-announcement
• https://petertodd.org/2016/opentimestamps-git-integration