After joining Bell labs in the late 80s, Scott Stornetta was faced with scandals in the company, which were publications in extreme results could be easily manipulated.
At the time, examination of some lab notebooks, original publication results were proven to be altered using a different ink than the ones originally used. Because records would become more digital, Stornetta grew concerned about the future of record keeping.
He knew that digital records could be easily altered, and in the future, things can certainly get worse.
While Stornetta did not have expertise in digital documents or cryptography, he was already trained as a theoretical physicist.
Stornetta continued to pursue his interest, and his mission was to try solving document manipulation issues by immutability of digital records.
In Bell labs, employees were encouraged work on open projects. People could work on anything as long they stated the problem.
"No manager directed your work, results did not have to be on a timeline. The advantage of an environment like that is that it throws together brilliant people from multiple disciplines, sparking open collaboration. Many storied and world changing products were born from these two cauldrons," said Stornetta.
It was in Bell Labs that Stornetta met Stuart Haber, a cryptographer.
Stornetta convinced Haber that the immutability of digital records was a problem worth solving. Their initial solution was to create hash functions and digital certificates, in which documents would be reduced to a hash.
Hash is widely used concept in cryptography, something that Haber has knowledge of.
Using hash that has a fixed length result that is usually a few bytes long, clients who wished to timestamp the document must send a hash rather than the document to a Time Stamping Service (TSS). It's this TSS that would create the needed timestamp for the document’s hash in order to certify it.
However, TSS is considered the single witness to timestamp, meaning that it's vulnerable to corruption or fraud.
To address this issue, the two suggested that trust should be distributed by creating multiple certifiers of a timestamp. The users themselves would act as each others certifiers. This was where the two created a way to decentralize trust.
In a paper titled "How To Time-Stamp a Digital Document", which was published in August 19, 1990, Scott Stornetta and Stuart Haber wrote that:
The first solution to the problem of creating an immutable linked timestamp on a series of digital documents, is considered the foundation of blockchain, a technology that would become popular 20 years later.
The technology was developed by Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym of a person (or a group or people), who developed blockchain, to result in the creation of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.
It was Nakomoto that took the paper, as well as another two that were also written by Stornetta and Haber (titled: "Improving the efficiency and reliability of digital time-stamping", written in 1993, and "Secure names for bit-strings", written in 1997), to a new height.
Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2009 Bitcoin whitepaper referenced those three papers from Scott Stornetta and Stuart Haber.
For his work, Scott Stornetta was once speculated to be Satoshi Nakamoto, in which he denied.
