Timestamping Smart Ledgers Comparable, Universal, Traceable, Immune
Timestamping Smart Ledgers Comparable, Universal, Traceable, Immune June 2018 Timestamping Smart Ledgers Comparable, Universal, Traceable, Immune Timestamping Smart Ledgers Comparable, Universal, Traceable, Immune June 2018 Sam Carter Financial Sector Researcher and Quant Developer Distributed Futures 1 /57 © Z/Yen Group, 2018 Timestamping Smart Ledgers Comparable, Universal, Traceable, Immune Foreword What time is it? When did something happen? When is an event expected? How much time separates two events? Which came first? These questions arise in everyday life and in every kind of discipline. For centuries clockmakers have striven to improve ways to measure time and to achieve ever higher degrees of precision, to meet the demand for its closer and closer estimation – and by achieving that improvement have enabled ever more exacting applications of timekeeping, as the measurement of time has become almost unimaginably precise. Over that period changes in technology have also allowed a uniform time to be widely known to an accuracy not just to the hour but to the minute and then to the second and within even smaller tolerances, in public, in our houses and places of work, and carried on our persons. Centralised time synchronises our local time, and sub-microsecond accuracy routinely enables satellite navigation – relying on the connection of ‘when’ with ‘where’ by the speed of light. In recent years, computing has transformed the speed of financial trading, and following this, the recording of trades – and in particular when they took place – has become far more stringently regulated, with timestamping to the microsecond required in some areas. The story of John Harrison and his marine timekeepers is an example of how an eighteenth-century authority, the Board of Longitude, required demonstration that his new technology was sufficiently accurate and fit for purpose, navigation at sea.
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