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OpenTimestamps Client Release Notes

v0.6.0

  • Git tree rehashing is now always enabled; the --rehash-tree option is now ignored. This means that timestamps can be extracted for individual files within Git repos timestamped with this version onwards using the ots git-extract subcommand.
  • Fixed crash when trying to timestamp git commits with very large commit messages.
  • Standard app directory locations are now used, in particular for the timestamp cache.

New Calendar Server

Thanks to Vincent Cloutier from Catallaxy, who has committed to running it indefinitely.

This means that Peter Todd is no longer a single-point of failure for OTS clients with default settings. By default both the ots client and the git commit timestamper only consider a timestamp complete if at least two calendars replied; previously Peter ran two out of three calendars. With the new Catallaxy calendar, that's two out of four, which means as long as the other two calendars are operating clients will continue to function with default settings even if all of Peter's calendars are down.

Bitcoin Timestamp Display Precision

Previously we'd display Bitcoin timestamps with precision down to the second, which misrepresents how precise a Bitcoin timestamp can actually be as adversarial miners can get away with creating blocks whose timestamps are inaccurate by multiple hours, or more. This has been changed to rounding off to the nearest day, which better represents the actual accuracy of a Bitcoin timestamp.

Examples of the new UX:

$ ots verify examples/empty.ots
Assuming target filename is 'examples/empty'
Success! Bitcoin block 129405 attests existence as of 2011-06-08 EDT

$ git tag -v opentimestamps-client-v0.5.1
object dcc45495b682c522170e8c2148b4759632e9d7fa
type commit
tag opentimestamps-client-v0.5.1
tagger Peter Todd <[email protected]> 1513029381 -0500

Release opentimestamps-client-v0.5.1
ots: Got 1 attestation(s) from https://finney.calendar.eternitywall.com
ots: Got 1 attestation(s) from https://bob.btc.calendar.opentimestamps.org
ots: Success! Bitcoin block 498825 attests existence as of 2017-12-11 EST
ots: Good timestamp
gpg: Signature made Mon 11 Dec 2017 04:56:22 PM EST
gpg:                using RSA key 2481403DA5F091FB
gpg: Good signature from "Peter Todd <[email protected]>"
gpg:                 aka "[jpeg image of size 5220]"

For those who do want a more precise timestamp, the height of the block attesting to the timestamp is now displayed, allowing a manual investigation of it.

v0.5.1

Updated dependencies, which ultimately means the segwit-supporting python-bitcoinlib v0.9.0 is used instead of the non-segwit v0.8.0

v0.5.0

Installation via setup.py is now supported!

Breaking change: The remote calendar whitelist options have been reworked. The new behavior is that the --whitelist option adds additional remote calendars to the default whitelist. If you don't want to use the default whitelist, it can be disabled with the --no-default-whitelist option, replacing the prior --no-remote-calendars option, which no longer exists.

v0.4.0

Minor breaking change: git-gpg-wrapper now throws an error if --rehash-trees is used when GitPython isn't installed.

Note that the pysha3 library is now a required dependency.

  • Remote Bitcoin nodes are now supported.
  • New SHA1 collision example.
  • Better error handling.
  • ots info now shows the results of operations in verbose mode.
  • Support for decoding, but not verifying, Ethereum block header attestations.
  • Support for the keccak256 opcode (required for Ethereum-using proofs).

v0.3.3

While the actual code changes are pretty minor, this release is an important step forward for the OpenTimestamps project in terms of robustness.

First of all, we've added a new calendar: https://finney.calendar.eternitywall.com/

The new calendar is run by Eternity Wall, which means it's both separate infrastructure, and separate administration, to the existing two calendars run by Peter Todd. By default the OpenTimestamps client requires at least two calendars to reply within five seconds for a timestamp to be created; if less than two reply the stamp command returns an error (also true for the Git support). If all three calendars reply within five seconds, all three attestations are saved in the timestamp proof.

The upshot of this is availability: the default configuration can now tolerate downtime on any one calendar with no problems. Secondly, all three calendars would have to fail for a timestamp to fail to be committed to Bitcoin in a timely manner.

Finally all three calendars now allow you to download a full copy of their calendar data; with that data you can verify any timestamp ever created by them. See the README for details on how this works.

v0.3.2

  • SOCKS5 proxy now supported, e.g. to route remote calendar requests through Tor.
  • ots upgrade now works on Windows.
  • ots upgrade now supports --dry-run
  • n-of-m w/ timeouts now used when creating timestamps.

v0.3.1

  • Fixed crash when verifying non-timestamped Git commits.

v0.3.0

(Minor) breaking change: git-gpg-wrapper has been renamed to ots-git-gpg-wrapper to make the name unique to OpenTimestamps.

  • Timestamps are now submitted to multiple calendars in parallel.
  • ots git-extract now works with relative paths.
  • Improved error message when ots git-extract used on a non-rehash-trees commit.
  • ots git-extract no longer clobbers existing timestamp files.
  • ots info output is now ordered consistently across multiple invocations.

v0.2.3

Note that the the required version of python-bitcoinlib has been increased in this release.

  • Use dynamic path insert rather than symlink for compatibility with Windows.
  • Fix an incompatibility with newer Git versions
  • Improve GPG wrapper

v0.2.2

  • Display reason given from calendar when a timestamp commitment isn't found, e.g. because the timestamp is pending confirmation in the Bitcoin blockchain.
  • Improved error messages.

v0.2.1

  • Improved error messages when ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf can't be read.
  • Improved error messages for IO errors.
  • Support for attestations by unknown notaries (forward compatibility).
  • Improved handling of corrupt timestamps: It should not be possible for a malicious remote calendar to do anything other than make us think a timestamp is invalid, a problem that's relatively easy to fix.
  • Attestations from remote calendars are always displayed in the logs, even if they duplicate attestations from other calendars.

v0.2.0

Major rewrite and public alpha release.

v0.1.0

Initial version, not widely used.