Ideas Ahead of Their Time: Digital Time Stamping

As with other ideas, new thoughts on improving security might require an appropriate technical environment, effective productization, suitable marketing, and good luck but might face the obstacle of confidentiality. Security suggestions are often made and tested in secret, and data regarding their effectiveness is often hard to come by. This is understandable; we don´t want to publicize techniques to help hackers. But it also means that ideas aren´t explored by a wider community and might be overlooked. Digital time stamping as a way to certify transaction dates, although not kept secret, was given a second life thanks to Bitcoin. Solutions to other current security problems might be hiding in old technologies; let´s hope we can find some.