[Lurker decloak]
This thread has reached the point where it could use an injection of keyless signature infrastructure, as invented by Ahto Buldas of Guardtime (I am not associated with them):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_timestampingSome forms of global coordination, such as a stochastic cooperative signal that is
widely observable, are compatible with decentralized paranoia. Just ask neurons and ants.
Perhaps Mr. Reed might reconsider his resignation to PKI and central servers with this information.
[/Decloak]
Thanks for the help, Scumby!
I wanted to offer a document timestamping API which would not necessarily be evidence in a court of law but would provide a distributed, robust service implemented with micropayments. This is an excellent implementation suggestion for this skill, which is required by the nomadic mint which timestamps incoming transactions. I would then be easy to expose this skill as a money-making microservice API. Apparently the Bouncy Castle cryptography library I use has a time stamp protocol server that I will evaluate.
Keyless Signature Infrastructure is interesting. I understand Merkle trees and this is similar. I will stay with self-signed X.509 certificates for identification, digital signatures for messages, and message channel encryption.