Invention: an improvement to providing the provenance of a file using a blockchain

I thought I'd start a new series of videos, this time discussing some of the blockchain-based inventions I've produced over the last few years.

However, this time I am going to focus more on the problem they address, rather than the solution that they provide.

First up - an improvement to blockchain-based file provenance systems.

The problem is that for this you need three pieces of data: the file, the hash (on the blockchain), and a pointer to the location of the hash and which blockchain it is on (such a pointer is a URL, or uniform resource locator).

This third piece can get lost if the file is moved around, and in practice, you need to rely on a third party to manage it for you.

Which kind of defeats the decentralization aspect of blockchain. Why not have the third party store it on a database?

Furthermore, I can take your file and publish its hash along with my name on a different provenance blockchain, and fool people into believing it's my file.

The solution: embed the URL in the file itself, and publish a hash of (file + URL) on the blockchain.

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