Project Timestamper locks 339 billion web snapshots into Bitcoin
Timestamping a Giant Record of the Web
Project Timestamper has cryptographically timestamped all 339 billion web page snapshots from Common Crawl—over 10 petabytes of data collected across 18 years—by committing hashes to the Bitcoin blockchain via OpenTimestamps. The process took just weeks because Common Crawl had already grouped snapshots into about 134 million blocks. Anyone can now verify any single snapshot in seconds with a simple command, ensuring the record remains tamper-evident as AI-generated content blurs the line between original and imitation.
As AI's capability to generate plausible data and hack databases continues to grow, how will we know what's original and what is modification, imitation, confabulation?