Truth is the most valuable common resource underpinning our society. Good-bad, right-wrong, rich-poor, fair-fraud all depend on society accepting that truth exists. Truth is a resource that everyone has access to, yet becomes depleted when overused in support of individual interests. In our digital world, truth is currently in short supply.

From “Alt-Facts” to “proprietary data” to “Fake News,” the concept of truth as a common resource that we can all depend upon seems elusive. Of the more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data that will be created just TODAY, most will exist in systems that are unaccountable to those they impact. Today IoT systems will tell us how comfortable we are, Social Mapping will tell us who we like, while Big Data will tell us if we are trustworthy, before potentially giving us completely different “truths” tomorrow. Technology is creating and rewriting histories without the shared anchors that build community.

Blockchain is supposed to change this fluidity of our technological reality. By making data immutable, blockchain can bring permanence to shared data. Yet current governance models that allow those with the most resources to define access skew reality for the unrepresented. When a supermajority of blockchain network hashrates are dominated by a handful of actors, the outcome will always be inequitable. When used as the basis for our digital reality, inequitable “truth” provides little more than shadows of agreement.

We built Trokt to remake the vessel that holds our communities’ truths. We saw truth in the digital world suffering the same fate described as the tragedy of the commons. From the mountains of data we create daily, many over use, some over share, and most overpower reality with manufactured positions. Our inability to believe our digital world due to the overuse of our seemingly endless supply of data is becoming our society’s tragedy of truth.

That is why we built Trokt to create a new public accountability grounded in the Ostrom principles that can protect the shared value of our digital truth.

The Neopublic Constitution of Truth

Trokt believes that digital “truth” only exists when it is collectively protected. This protection must rely upon a community consciousness of digital value, respect for privacy, and balanced progress. To achieve this protection, Trokt is a neopublic blockchain network that operates under the following principles.

P1. Trokt is a Network of pre-approved operators providing governance and ledger oversight (referred to as Nodes) that are complying with the terms of the Trokt Network Agreement.

P2. The Entity responsible for ensuring proper Node operation must be real and known.

P3. The Network administration costs paid each year by an Entity to ensure Network viability must be defined using a free-market methodology.

P4. Consensus on any Network decision is found when a Node’s Influence is accepted by other Nodes.

P5. Any Node may prevent any other Node from taking any action that would reduce Network value.

P6. Each Node Entity must establish a Node Governance Committee that takes actions on behalf of its Node.

P7. Any individual or organization who is authorized to submit data to the Node must have access to join its Node Governance Committee.

P8. Consensus on any Node Governance Committee decision is found when a Member’s Influence is accepted by other Members.

Chris Draper is the Managing Director of Trokt, and represents Node1 on the Digital Truth Governance Committee (DTGC) chaired by Prof Angie Raymond. Please click for more information on the Trokt Network or Contact Trokt to help the DTGC explore the benefits of Ostrom governance for community truth.

The Tragedy of Truth was originally published in trokt on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is a written representation of the presentation given by Chris Draper (Trokt) and Angie Raymond (Kelley School of Business, Indiana University) on October 29, 2019, at 3:20pm Eastern at the NCSC ODR2019 Summit held at the Colonial Williamsburg Lodge in Williamsburg, VA.

There is no lack of technology options that could be cobbled together into an online dispute resolution (ODR) solution. From commercial off the shelf (COTS) products to custom software, ODR solutions all require some mixture of integrated routines and manual processes that allow for a dispute to be acknowledged, all the relevant parties to be included, communication to occur between parties under varying levels of confidentiality, documentation of any agreement, and archiving of any summary documentation. How these products, software, and processes are assembled can have significant impacts on the appropriateness of any technology enabled ODR solution. This presentation offers courts and other procurement professionals an assessment roadmap for ensuring that any ODR solution proposed by a vendor provides reasonable protection of the disputing parties’ data.

How to Assess Technology Risk

The risk associated with a particular outcome is the probability that the particular outcome will happen multiplied by the value of that outcome happening. When assessing the suitability of any system that is protecting data, it may be easiest to think of the data as a pile of gold sitting in the open.

The most common way to protect piles of gold is to put it behind a locked door.

If the gold being protected is valuable enough, no matter what type of lock is used, there is a non-zero probability that any lock on any door can be broken open.

The most common way to reduce the risk from this type of breach is to put more locks on the door.

This approach to risk reduction focuses on reducing the probability of accessing the protected gold. In the case of data, this is achieved through techniques like multi-factor authorization. When plotting data protection risk against its who axes of breach probability and breach cost, putting more locks on the door reduces the breach probability.

While most protection strategies focus on breach probability, there is only so much protection that can be employed before a system is unusable. For example, when multiple passwords and other authorization steps are required every time a user needs to log in, work arounds that negate such protection will always be found.

Risk can alternatively be lowered by reducing breach value. Looking back at the pile of gold behind a single door with one lock, breaking the lock provides access to all the gold being protected.

An alternative design strategy could allow for the gold to be separated into multiple compartments, each with its own protection.

By compartmentalizing the gold, breaking a single door will not provide access to the entire pile of gold.

This approach to risk reduction results in lowering the value of a breach once it occurs. In the case of data, this would be achieved through data segmentation strategies within database fragmenting or conditional permissioning practices. These strategies and practices ensure an individual who is within a system cannot move unimpeded throughout the entire system.

Most appropriately, system risk should be pursued through a mixture of breach probability reduction and corresponding consequence cost.

Finding an appropriate balance requires considering both probability and consequence reduction in the context of the economic cost required to make these reductions.

This need to balance technological risk and implementation cost is specifically called out in the definition of Reasonable Protection as recently clarified by the ABA in the clarification to Rule 1.6.

This relationship between security, usability, and cost provide a basis for developing a risk-based relationship for defining “ethical,” wherein it is unethical to maintain a current system if a more reasonable, lower-risk options is economically available.

When looking at the current practice currently used in the ODR space, given the current operational breach probabilities we are observing relative to the likely consequence cost associated with breaches, it is unethical for the traditional operator to not improve upon currently used systems.

However, as we look to improve upon this our current risk levels, it is important to examine any alternatives from three primary perspectives: does our alternative ensure the any data is correct, does it ensure it remains unaltered, and does the it protect the data in a manner that does not indirectly release any information of value.

When looking at these issued from the context of a “smart contract,” we should be looking at these risks from the perspective of any generalized, blockchain enabled system that draws in data from multiple, distributed sources so that it is immutably archived.

First, with respect to data correctness: if we have a pile of gold, is it really gold?

If we are using a system where communication error rates are significant, this risk of bad data being inserted into an immutable system does not fix the fact that the data is still bad. If anything, it makes the problem worse.

Second, with respect to persistence of data, will it remain gold?

While there is much discussion about tools like blockchain that have the ability to ensure data will never be altered, it is important to consider both situations where the data should not be altered, or others where the method of making data unalterable prevent it from being expunged in a manner as required by law. Immutability has the ability to be both good or bad, and its value must be assessed in the context of the technology’s use.

Third, with respect to incidental releases, does the context reveal the gold?

Many tools that are now intended to provide privacy — like encrypted emails — are at risk of being deployed in a manner where the value of the data being protected is still revealed due to the fundamental nature of the vehicle being used. For example, an encrypted email from a divorce attorney sent to the client’s partner will still reveal the nature of the data inside the email, thus causing an economic consequence that is fundamentally equivalent to the data being fully released. It is important that these contextual breaches are accounted for in any system being selected.

Accounting for these issues, especially in the blockchain space, is already seeing significant innovation when developed with a risk reduction focus. For example, Trokt has recently rolled out a “neopublic” blockchain solution that addresses many of these issues by separating the context of data being written into a full node from the individuals writing it, and separating the governance strategy for network use from the technological implementation of data validation and deconfliction.

In the Trokt model, these types of innovations require careful consideration regarding governance strategy in order to ensure the technological innovations do not result in new failure mechanisms. In the Trokt network, these risk mitigation innovations in the underlying technology are supported with an Ostrom-based governance model that approaches network value as a limited community resource.

This strategy, like all others, will have strengths and weaknesses that must be assessed in a deliberate, systematic fashion. So long as the evaluation is focused on assessing how often an outcome can produce an approximate cost, with any economically accessible alternative selected when it can reduce the risk of a data breach, the improved system will be the ethical option for supporting ODR.

Ethical Technology Risk was originally published in trokt on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The dream of blockchain is prosperity through decentralized, individual responsibility. Public blockchain applications like Bitcoin offer everyone equal access to participation. With Bitcoin, anyone can lend their excess computational capacity towards building this decentralized world, with those who participate the most seeing the greatest rewards. These principles of equality were expected to enable the distributed, mass participation which should create predictable value through system stability.

In practice, this equality has led to inequitable uncertainty.

The technological focus on unmitigated individualism seen in blockchain applications like Bitcoin allows the most dominant to dominate. In the case of Bitcoin, Chinese miners recently controlled over 70% of the network’s collective hashrate, 29% of trading volume, and potentially up to 39% of all Bitcoins. This kind of network dominance exists because of China’s resource advantage. With so much centralization around Chinese miners and traders, the entire Bitcoin network can be fundamentally altered by Chinese decisions — a reality that was not supposed to be possible.

Yet this architecture is not unique to Bitcoin. This focus on unmitigated individualism is a fundamental design choice seen throughout most blockchain applications. This design assumes that the aggregate outcome of uninhibited individual actions will produce a collective benefit, much like the Central Limit Theorem assumes the aggregate effect of normal actions will always approach normalcy. In the same way that the Central Limit Theorem fails when inputs are abnormal, the unmitigated participation of dominant entities in any economic society has nearly always lead to inequity.

The Neopublic Approach

Trokt’s “neopublic” blockchain network attacks this inequity by combining public governance and private technology elements into a flexible, efficient, collaborative architecture. Unlike many public networks, the central authorities holding Trokt’s truth, the full nodes, must be pre-approved to participate within the Trokt digital community. These nodes cannot be just anonymous servers in a Chinese or Russian warehouse, the Trokt neopublic architecture requires each node to be sponsored by a known team of individuals or organizations who take responsibility for the ongoing maintenance and decisions of the node. While it is the responsibility of Trokt to ensure the technological integrity of all approved communications is maintained, it is the opportunity of a node’s sponsoring team to determine what communications or uses are collectively approved.

The center of this decision making for each node resides with the Node Governance Community (NGC). The NGC is a group of individuals who have earned a stake in the governance of that node, and make decisions on behalf of the node. If a customer does not like the price or restrictions imposed by a specific node’s NGC, the customer may negotiate with any of the other limited number of node NGCs in the Trokt network. Since all NGCs are independent, any NGC can strike any deal with any customer.

If this individualism remained unmitigated, the Trokt network would be highly susceptible to devaluation. For example, if one NGC starts slashing prices relative to other NGCs, or starts allowing disreputable customers to write data tied to illicit activities, the actions of a single NGC have the ability to devalue the entire network. Trokt avoids this risk of devaluation by prioritizing the many over any one.

To prioritize the good of all participants over the value attained by a single entity, Trokt requires community collaboration both upstream and downstream of each NGC. To avoid problems upstream, each NGC is required to allow individual customers to collaboratively engage in local community decision making. Each NGC may tailor its collaboration method in any unique manner that best suits its end users, yet any tailoring must ensure end users are benefited by and empowered to participate in NGC decisions. This framework will still allow end users to engage another node if its current NGC is not meeting its needs, yet it should be more likely that an end user will stay and influence its digital community to better meet its needs.

Identically, Trokt ensures downstream stability in its network through NGC collaboration within its digital commons.

The Digital Commons Solution

The Trokt blockchain network is valuable because its users trust that it will always be able to validate their truth. This trust recedes if the network becomes associated with disreputable customers. This value diminishes if the use cost no longer reflects the value provided. NGCs cannot compete for customers as if they are operating in a zero-sum world. Without mitigating the pursuit of market share by nodes in the Trokt blockchain network, NGCs would devalue the network in the same way overfishing a public pond brings starvation.

The neopublic structure of the Trokt blockchain network creates a pure tragedy of the commons dilemma. To prevent devaluation of the network, individual and community values must align. To do this, Trokt employs tiers of governance. At the node level, any member of the public may earn a stake in the NGC of each node, and each NGC decides what data and from whom may be written to its node. This is balanced at the network level by the Digital Truth Governance Committee (DTGC) that oversees operation of the entire network, on which representatives of each NGC participate.

This hierarchy requires NGCs to consider both how they maximize the value of their node, while not reducing the value of the entire network. In the competition for customers, the victory of one NGC must also better its rival. In the competition for innovation, breakthroughs must be additive for everyone. In the competition for growth, the inclusion of new nodes must benefit both existing and future NGCs. In the competition for truth, the ledger’s expansion must also increase its exclusivity.

In the “digital commons,” Trokt is blazing a new path under the guidance of DTGC Chairperson Angie Raymond. With input from an array of international experts with insight into organizations like the American Bar Association, the National Center for State Courts, or the Delaware Court of Chancery, Trokt has a commanding head start on how to apply Ostrom solutions in the world of digital capitalism.

Now only time will tell if Trokt can instill community in a digital world that almost myopically prizes individuality.

This article was supported with guidance and input from Angie Raymond and Corey Pigott. To learn more about Trokt’s neopublic blockchain network, please visit www.ecert.email

Digital Communities and Embracing the Commons was originally published in trokt on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Blockchain is rapidly gaining acceptance as a proven way to authenticate records and evidence within the legal community. While best known for its use in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, blockchain is actually a far broader, powerful technology in its own right that can more generally be used to archive digital truth. As more court systems accept blockchain as a fundamental technology, the number of sensitive files being validated on the Trokt neopublic blockchain network using Blockchain Certified Email or an enterprise equivalent is poised to skyrocket.

According to a recent article in the ABA Journal, nearly 1 in 4 states have already enacted, or are planning to propose, laws or regulations that specifically identify blockchain as a court-admissible means of self-authenticating digital records. Of those that have not specifically identified blockchain by name, every court nationwide has already approved and widely uses the hashing technology at the center of Trokt’s “digital thumbprinting” technology.

The type of hashing technology accepted by courts nationwide and incorporated into Trokt’s “digital thumbprint” is an irreversible process of converting the bits and bytes that make up any digital file into a unique, repeatable alpha-numeric output of a fixed length. Hashing ensures file validity because any change in any single bit or byte making up any file — a change even smaller than deleting a single period from a 600-page file — will produce a new, unique hash.

Courts are already universally accepting hashing as a necessary component of any digital forensic analysis. Hashing during a digital forensic analysis proves document validity by comparing the hash of a questionable document to the hash of the original document. If the hashes are the same, it is admissible evidence that proves every bit and byte of each document is exactly the same. If the hashes don’t match, you can be certain the document was altered at some point in time after the original document was certified.

The universal acceptance of the hashing technology incorporated into Trokt’s “digital thumbprint” by American courts is an important first step for the explicit acceptance of Trokt’s Blockchain Certified Email solution. States like Arizona, Arkansas, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Washington, Vermont, and Wyoming already adopting or crafting legislation that is explicitly pro-blockchain accelerates the adoption of solutions built upon tools like the Trokt neopublic blockchain network. These steps indicate a groundswell of blockchain acceptance by American courts is forming.

Yet the real future of blockchain adoption by the American court system — the action that has led to this unavoidable groundswell — is seen in the bold pro-blockchain stance already taken in Delaware.

Delaware’s decision in 2017 to amend its corporate laws so businesses can maintain records on a blockchain was a transformative leap bringing legitimacy to blockchain in the business world. Long known for its pro-business laws and precedent setting Court of Chancery, the majority of all publicly traded companies in the United States are incorporated or domiciled in Delaware. Because most companies are incorporated or domiciled in Delaware, most disputes are settled by the specialty judges in the Court of Chancery whose sole focus on business-related cases enable well reasoned, predictable outcomes that are routinely cited and adopted as precedent across the United States.

Delaware taking an active approach in blockchain acceptance means Trokt’s Blockchain Certified Email solution will soon be as universally common as the core hashing technology used by its “thumbprint.” After all, in American business law:

As goes Delaware, so goes the rest of the United States. And Delaware is going with blockchain.

To learn more about Trokt Blockchain Certified Email and the neopublic network it is built upon, please visit www.ecert.email

Blockchain Acceptance in United States Courts was originally published in trokt on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Many enthusiasts routinely claim that blockchain can do everything from replacing central banks to curing cancer. Technologically speaking, it can’t.

Blockchain is uniquely capable of performing one simple yet vitally important task: validating distributed truth.

Instead of the standard “third party validation” that is often used as evidence during contentious matters, blockchain enables “n-party validation.” Instead of having one notary confirm that she or he has seen the sensitive information presented to her or him, blockchain can enlist a nearly unlimited number of entities to relatively instantaneously validate that a shared truth, no matter where it is saved, is valid.

In legally sensitive matters, knowing who shared, received, and validated a piece of data — the context of the data, often considered “metadata” — is often more valuable than knowing the actual data itself. Trokt’s neopublic blockchain is a patent-pending architectural innovation that removes the contextual vulnerabilities inherent in traditional, public blockchain solutions. In short, Trokt’s neopublic blockchain allows for “n-party validation” without displaying the context associated with sensitive data.

This is extremely powerful, but it is not magic. Trokt’s noepublic blockchain is only as effective as the appropriateness of its use cases. Just a few of the many effective uses of Trokt’s neopublic architecture include the following examples:

Local Government

Many local governments operate like small, family businesses. Most elected officials in local government are neither seasoned executives nor professional politicians. They are everyday citizens trying to contribute to their communities. Similarly, many of these local governments do not have refined document management tools or processes. Important files are often approved, physically signed, scanned, and then held on multiple laptops, external drives, or commercial cloud services.

When everything is fine, these processes get the job done. When there is a problem, it becomes very costly to figure out what happened. For example, if four different people have eight different versions of an important file saved in twenty different places, which one is real?

By adding a web portal where local officials can “thumbprint” any file as soon as it is scanned, the Trokt neopublic blockchain can later validate any file’s thumbprint no mater where the file ends up being stored, how many copies of it are made, or how it is renamed. By storing these thumbprints in its distributed network without changing how communities store the actual document, Trokt adds a layer of fraud protection that costs a tiny fraction of traditional solutions.

Truck Transmissions

Truck transmissions are often made up of many different parts from many different, competing suppliers. Since the transmission is a key component affecting everything from fuel economy to tailpipe emissions, all these different parts from these competing suppliers must work in unison. However, while all these parts must work in unison, each still produce proprietary datasets that the supplier does not want shared with the other suppliers in that same transmission.

When everything is fine, everyone gets to keep their data private. When there is a problem, it can become very costly to prove your data is accurate. For example, if a vehicle starts to fail emissions tests, how will one supplier prove that the data the government requests is valid without sharing all of the contextual data it wanted to keep private?

By adding a process where sensor data is pulled at various intervals and thumbprinted, the Trokt neopublic blockchain can validate any data interval provided to regulators. By storing these thumbprints in a distributed network, suppliers can reduce the cost of proving regulatory compliance without the risk of giving away design secrets to their competitors.

Trade Secrets

In the intellectual property world, it is costly to publicly protect inventions. For many startups, protecting intellectual property is done through secrecy. So long as no one knows the secret formula, it can be protected — and the company retains its value.

When these secrets are kept, these startups will often thrive. When a secret is stolen, the secrecy that once protected it makes its theft difficult to prove. For example, if a genetic detection company never told anyone the secret of how they can achieve better results for a lower cost, how would they publicly prove a secret that no one else knows if a former employee tries to patent their secret invention?

By thumbprinting all secret theories, designs, and results, the Trokt neopublic blockchain proves a secret exists without ever telling anyone what the secret is or who knows it. By storing these thumbprints in a distributed network, inventors can instantly prove that a secret no one has ever seen has existed unaltered since the time it was protected with Trokt.

Music Copyrights

Many of our most popular songs owe much of their success to a unique hook. While a perfect combination of beats can now come from nearly anywhere, it must be shared for it to catch on. When an aspiring artist starts shopping their music to agents or collaborators, especially when it could be the basis for a multi-platinum hit, she or he will rarely have the resources to protect it from theft.

When everyone plays by the rules, the aspiring artist becomes a star. When a superstar claims your creation is theirs, it becomes expensive to prove what is your property. For example, if a multi-platinum artist stole your hook and then claimed they had created it, how would the average artist prove she or her created it first?

By using a portal like Blockchain Certified Email, the Trokt neopublic blockchain can validate that a specific music file existed and has remained unaltered since the time it was certified. By storing the music file’s digital thumbprint in a distributed network, an artist can instantly prove ownership of that file she or he shared with a superstar — the hook that propelled their next album up the charts.

Medical Advocates

Many hospitals are expanding their use of digital medical records and files. However, these files are rarely centrally stored or universally shared across all hospitals. Patients with long medical histories or many hospital interactions may often be provided with a medical records portal where they or their family members can access important files.

When medical care is progressing as expected, everyone can trust that everything which should be in the digital records portal will remain accessible to everyone. When there is a costly mistake, these hospital-provided and managed portals may no longer be the permanent repositories as originally claimed. For example, if a doctor documents an error that will cost her or his medical license, can everyone trust that the file will remain in the medical records portal?

By downloading medical records and capturing their thumbprint, the Trokt neopublic blockchain can validate that a document existed in the past even if its original is deleted. By storing these thumbprints in a distributed network, medical advocates can prove that a file which proves medical malpractice has not been altered since its thumbprint was stored — evidence that remains even if it is purged from the digital records portal.

To learn more about Trokt Blockchain Certified Email and the neopublic architecture it is built upon, please visit www.ecert.email . Have any ideas on how you could use the Trokt neopublic blockchain network? Drop us a note at blockchain@trokt.org and we may sponsor your idea with $10,000 of Trokt network credit!

The Promise of Neopublic Blockchain was originally published in trokt on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Almost everyone has seen the © symbol on books, magazines, web-pages, music, or movies. It is a symbol that the creators of literary, musical, dramatic, pictorial, graphic, sculptural, or architectural works often depend on to protect the value of their creativity. Yet copyright protection exists even when this symbol is not present — if you can prove it.

The United States Copyright Office Copyright Basics Circular notes:

“Copyright is a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States to the authors of “original works of authorship” that … can be perceived, reproduced, or communicated for more than a short time. Copyright protection in the United States exists automatically from the moment the original work of authorship is [created].”

If copyright can be proved, anyone who wants to reproduce, modify, distribute, perform, or display the creator’s work must get the creator’s permission. This “right to authorize others to exercise these exclusive rights” is how creators earn their livings.

Asserting your Rights

A creator must have a certificate of registration issued by the U.S. Copyright Office in order to be fully protected in a court of the law. If awarded:

“A certificate of registration [proves] … the validity of the copyright [if] … registered before or within five years after the work is first published [and] … The copyright owner may be entitled to claim statutory damages and attorney’s fees in an infringement lawsuit, provided that the work was registered before the infringement began or within three months after the first publication of the work”

When an application for copyright registration is submitted:

“As a general rule, the U.S. Copyright Office will not conduct its own factual investigation … to confirm the truth of the statements made in the application …. Ordinarily, the Office will accept the facts stated in the application, unless they are implausible or conflict with … other sources of information that are known by the Office.”

This deference to any claims made in an application allows the copyright registration process to be an efficient vehicle for creators protecting their livelihoods. Until someone registers YOUR property first.

But how do you PROVE it?

Authors shopping for a book deal, musicians looking for a recording contract, or artists seeking a patron are taking a tremendous leap of faith when they share their unpublished works. Since “a private display … does not constitute publication” of a work, there is a real risk that someone a creator trusts could take their work, claim it is hers or his, and be awarded a certificate of copyright registration. Since the U.S. Copyright Office does not perform an investigation before it awards a certification of registration, a creator must be ready to protect her or his work by proving its origin.

Generations of creators have proven the origin of their work by sending it to themselves via Certified Mail. This technique has often been referred to as the “poor man’s copyright.” By sending original works to themselves via Certified Mail, holding them in the sealed envelope until needed, and only opening them when directed by the court, creators can prove that the work in the envelope has both existed and remained unaltered since the envelope was sealed.

While this “poor man’s copyright” is not the same as — nor does is offer any of the protections of — a certification of copyright registration, Certified Mail has often been the only protection creators may have when fighting against a U.S. Copyright Office certificate issued to someone else based on the creator’s stolen work.

The Poor Man’s Digital Copyright

In a world where digital creation, publication, and registration are creating works that sometimes can’t even be effectively produced in physical form, stuffing your digital work into a physical envelope may no longer be an option. Add on top of this the proliferation of tools that can create anything from sophisticated forgeries to deep fakes using little more than a laptop, and it is clear why the world has recently been looking bleak for the creative class. Until now.

Trokt’s Blockchain Certified Email, built upon a neopublic blockchain network governed by some of the world’s leading legal practitioners and scholars, offers all the protections of Certified Mail for digital files. By taking any file’s “digital thumbprint” and saving it in Trokt’s distributed network, any creator can prove that any digital file — from artwork to music to creations we have yet to even understand — has remained unaltered since the moment its thumbprint was saved. No matter where the file is saved, how many times it is copied, who holds it, or what it is renamed, the Blockchain Certified Email thumbprint offers the same protection generations before retained when they opened their Certified Mail envelope in court.

In a digital world, Blockchain Certified Email protects the creative class’s livelihood.

To learn more about Trokt’s Blockchain Certified Email, please visit www.ecert.email and for any questions please email blockchain@trokt.org

Protecting Creativity was originally published in trokt on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Trokt’s Blockchain Certified Email Portal writes your file’s “digital thumbprint” to our neopublic blockchain — while YOU keep control of YOUR file.

Our Blockchain Certified Email portal allows you to ensure that any digital file — contract, music, artwork, sensitive document — can be validated at any time in the future. To do this, our Blockchain Certified Email form will process your file’s digital thumbprint in a temporary folder, write the file’s digital thumbprint to the Trokt blockchain, and confirm it was written by emailing the file to you with its thumbprint and location, before deleting our temporary copy of your file — Trokt DOES NOT keep a copy of your actual file.

We at Trokt are excited you have taken interest in utilizing the Trokt Blockchain Certified Email to better certify and validate your important data! We have done our best to make the Certified Email Form as simple and user-friendly as possible. However, questions may still arise so we have created the following step-by-step guide to better assist users throughout the entire process. If any additional questions arise that were not touched upon in the guide, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our team. Furthermore, we are currently in a private beta so if there is any feedback you can provide to help us create a better product we would love to hear from you! The team can be reached through email at blockchain@trokt.org.

To use the Blockchain Certified Email form, just following the following simple steps:

As Digital Fakes Proliferate, Don’t risk it… Trokt it!

For more information on how to use Trokt Blockchain Certified Email, or to learn how to purchase a Trokt node, please contact Trokt via email at blockchain@trokt.org.

How to Protect Your Truth was originally published in trokt on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Since its creation in 1955, Certified Mail has become both a financially important product for the U.S. Postal Service and one that fulfills a critical legal and business need for American citizens. It has grown to be the largest of the Ancillary Services offered by the Postal Service.

Originally proposed as an offshoot of the Registered Mail system, Certified Mail was an innovation that provided a way for citizens to send critical business and legal documents with similar visibility and accountability, but at a lower price. Over time, citizens’ trust in Certified Mail has made it an essential communication channel between citizens and government, as it is used to transmit documents such as tax returns and a variety of important public notices. By including tracking and verification that a letter was sent and delivered, Certified Mail provides customers peace of mind about their most important mail items and offers added assurance and security for sensitive documents.

Due to these advantages, Certified Mail has served at least two critical legal functions. First, Certified Mail validates delivery. Parties in legal proceedings frequently must prove that they mailed relevant documents to other parties and that those documents were received. The mailing receipts and delivery notifications that Certified Mail provides allow it to be used as prima facie evidence in legal proceedings. Before its introduction, there was no nationwide agreement about what mail products met this legal standard. It has become a key method of legal correspondence between governments, citizens, and businesses. The use of Certified Mail to send such important documents demonstrates the trust that postal customers place in it, leading some customers to use Certified Mail even when they are not legally required to do so.

Second, Certified Mail validates content. Parties in legal proceedings, especially in those where an individual is in conflict with a much more powerful entity, need to prove the validity of their evidence. For decades, Certified Mail has been a trusted method used by inventors, whistleblowers, advocates, artists, and others to prove that a document existed without alteration since the date claimed. For example, inventors will send designs to themselves via Certified Mail in case their creation or ownership is challenged. Whistleblowers will send vital documents to themselves via Certified Mail in case all other copies are destroyed. Or advocates will send contentious notes to themselves via Certified Mail in case their accuracy is questioned. If an envelope sent via Certified Mail remains sealed, the court accepts that the documents within have existed and remain unaltered since the day they were sent via Certified Mail. The use of Certified Mail to validate the authenticity of such important documents demonstrates the need for community validation of authenticity, leading many individuals in legally sensitive professions to rely upon Certified Mail as a best practice for data protection.

Unfortunately, there are many flaws in the current system:

1. Long Processing Times — A common complaint is the long processing time that occurs when an individual tries to send Certified Mail. There are several unique aspects of processing Certified Mail that increases wait times. First, individuals must wait in line to send Certified Mail if they want the postmarked receipt necessary for legal reasons. Second, it takes clerks longer to process Certified Mail transactions than many others.Third, the actual delivery of the Certified Mail can take 3 to 10 business days. And if the recipient is not available to sign at time of delivery, that timeline can increase to 15 days at which point the mail is returned to the sender of no signature is received.

2. Complicated Forms — For the average postal customer, properly filling out and attaching Certified Mail forms can be daunting. The process can be further complicated by adding a Return Receipt, which contains more fields to fill out. When an individual incorrectly fills out a form — a frequent occurrence — this results in the clerk personally having to assist the customer, extending processing times and frustration.

3. Delivery Reliability — Missing scans, signatures, and mail pieces present an acute problem in the case of Certified Mail. When a piece goes missing, no signature is obtained, or there is no final delivery scan, the sender is entitled to a refund from the post office Aside from the financial risk posed by some of these delivery issues, delivery reliability is particularly important because much of Certified Mail’s value comes from the ability to prove that the delivery of the mail occurred. 65 percent of Certified Mail users list confirmation of delivery as the main reason they use Certified Mail.

4. Domestic Limitations — Certified Mail is a domestic mail product meaning the use of Certified Mail is limited to addresses within the United States. For international documentation validation, Certified Mail is not acceptable service.

Just as Certified Mail was developed as a better way to meet the emerging needs of customers in the 1950s, the antiquated and inefficient use of the U.S. Postal Service has paved the way for a new alternative in today’s digital age.

Certified Mail is widely used by Americans with approximately 58 percent of people having used it for either personal or professional mailings. However, usage has been in decline since the start of this decade as individuals and businesses turned to digital alternatives. Services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, other Cloud Storage providers, and dedicated data rooms strive to offer validation by providing auditable digital documentation protection. However, few digital documents in the legal community retain a fully auditable chain of custody within any of these systems. Without an external, community validation method for digital documents, when a digital document’s validity is questioned during an eDiscovery process, the only way to currently attempt to resolve any validity challenge is through a forensic analysis which can easily cost in the range of $5,000 up to $20,000.

As the legal system begins to grapple with a world that has progressed from simple fraud to deep fakes, the truth provided by Certified Mail in the physical world needs a digital equivalent.

This is where Trokt comes in. Trokt’s Blockchain Certified Email provides the digital authenticity equivalent to Certified Mail for any digital file type or content. Blockchain Certified Email provides that much needed auditable protection for digital files that cannot easily be physically saved and authenticated using Certified Mail. While the file remains in digital form while saved on any device,Trokt Blockchain develops the bit-by-bit hash or “digital thumbprint” of that file which can be instantly validated no matter where the file is later shared, renamed, or stored. No matter what, Trokt can instantly prove that the file in question has not been altered in any way since it was added to the Trokt Blockchain. Trokt Blockchain Certified Email saves our next generation the time and money required to validate the truth that previously could only be protected by Certified Mail.

To learn more about Trokt’s Blockchain Certified Email and the Trokt neopublic blockchain network it is built upon, please visit/read our website, whitepaper, or intro deck. Our Blockchain Certified Email is currently in private beta. To request access or if you have any additional questions, please email blockchain@trokt.org.

Certified Mail: Antiquated Protection was originally published in trokt on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Starting in 2016, the Front Royal-Warren County Economic Development Authority (EDA) executive director admitted to stealing $2,700,000 as part of an alleged multi-year $17,000,000 conspiracy that may have included the local Sheriff and multiple businessmen by the time it was stopped (The Northern Virginia Daily). While these alleged crimes included shell companies and misdirected payments as seen in many embezzlement cases, the part of the EDA case that is the hardest to prove has been the easiest to see. At the core of these alleged crimes were a few simple acts that everyone agrees happened yet have already cost over $650,000 to prove: digitally forged history.

Most local governments in America are moving to digital records. Instead of warehouses filled with paper copies of the hundreds to thousands of official, signed documents generated each month, documents are now printed, signed, scanned, and saved. Once saved, those files must be trustworthy. The person who controls what files are saved in those servers currently controls that digital truth.

In the Front Royal-Warren County case, the EDA executive director had access to the servers which held those official files. As with any employee or official in a similar capacity, anyone with access to those official files could log onto those servers, open the digital copy of any approved and scanned file, alter it on nearly any computer or device, and replace the real file with a digital forgery — creating a new digital history that “authorized” theft.

Theft that relies on digital documents — just like theft that relies upon paper documents — will often have a trail that investigators can use to unravel the crime. With digital documents, it is getting easier to erase a criminal’s digital trail, making guilt more difficult and expensive to prove.

Identifying forgeries in cases like the EDA’s requires examining a file’s metadata to see who has accessed, modified, or saved the file at what dates and on which devices. While sophisticated criminals can alter this data to render any conclusions useless, the cost of performing the investigation around a digital forensic analysis on the less sophisticated forgeries seen in the Warren County EDA case have already cost more than $450,000 and nearly $200,000 of directly associated legal fees — meaning it has already cost nearly a quarter of the money the EDA executive director admitted to stealing just to prove it had been stolen.

These costly investigations are now avoidable. While no one wants to expect that any current employees or future leaders will turn to fraud or theft, Trokt is a solution that will reduce the cost of digital forensic analyses like those required for the EDA case from more than $650,000 to $0.10 per document (Trokt).

Trokt does this by inserting one simple step into each document digitization process, a step that will take someone with internet access less than one minute to complete. Once a signed document is scanned, the administrator would use the Trokt portal to capture the document’s “digital thumbprint”. The file’s digital thumbprint would be saved in a distributed storage network, and the original file would be saved and controlled locally per the organization’s standard file management practices.

The process that Trokt uses to capture a file’s digital thumbprint creates a one-way scramble, or hash. This one-way scramble, unlike encryption, cannot be used to reproduce the original document — meaning a document remains secure even when its thumbprint is stored in a distributed network.

While a digital thumbprint cannot be used to recreate a file, each file’s unique thumbprint can be used to spot forgeries. Since every file has a unique digital thumbprint that never changes over time, any modifications to any file will instantly produce a completely different one-way scramble — immediately proving a forgery.

Trokt’s patent-pending method for distributed thumbprint storage protects these one-way scrambles by saving them in plain sight, so no single entity can ever change these historic records. Where Warren County’s executive director had the ability to rewrite the EDA’s digital history all on her own, Trokt’s network of independently validating servers means no single bad actor can stop the immediate discovery of a forgery.

The process used by Trokt to protect organizations from forgery serves the exact function investigators require when ensuring chain of custody in court admissible digital forensic analyses (Infosec). This means that Trokt will not only eliminate the cost of proving a forgery, potential future bad actors would be deterred from thinking they could get away with this type of digital alteration theft in the first place.

To learn more about Trokt’s document validation solutions and services, please contact us at blockchain@trokt.org.

Digitally Forged History was originally published in trokt on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.