Tue 11 Aug 2026

Haber and Stornetta published their hash-chain timestamping scheme in 1991, introducing the concept that a document's existence could be proven without trusting a single authority. The SECURE Notarization Act (H.R.1777, 119th Congress) would federally authorize remote online notarization — the digitization of a witness-based trust function that notaries public have performed in the United States since the colonial era. The 35-year gap between the availability of cryptographic timestamping and federal legislative adoption of digital notarization matches a broader pattern: legal systems absorb cryptographic verification methods one to three decades after the underlying primitives become available, constrained not by technical infeasibility but by institutional latency.

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