Timestamping

[Tony.Gurnick@nzdairy.co.nz (DNA)]

Could the cypher punks automatic signing
also be used as a distributed timestamping service?

Where you send a hash/document to it and it timestamps
and signs it, to the fact that this hash was in existsence
at the specified time.  Then it would forward your message
on to another such service picked at random until the hash
has been stamped the number of times you specified.  If you
collect a number of timestamps from around the world you
could make a case for a document existsing at a certian time.

You could also back & forward link in time to other documents
that each timestamp services has stamped!

Any comments????

		T