[davidlee1435]

I wish this were a thing, I really do. At the very least, I want to live in a future where we know if a piece of content was generated by a generative model or if it wasn't.

The question is- what is the incentive to burn gas (re: money) to timestamp the manifests before the regime comes into power?

[orblivion]

These organizations are already incentivized, somehow or other, to do the work of creating and maintaining their archives. I think their incentives are aligned with wanting them to be authenticated. If you think gas fees would be a concern, they could create and publish a manifest file once a year for any new videos, and write the hash of the manifest file to the blockchain. That's one hash published a year, that can't be a lot.

[orblivion]

Though I guess if you're worried about whether something happened last week, you'll want more speedy publishing of hashes. But for any events that happen _in_ that future, we probably won't have much reason to trust videos anyway. That's a whole other problem. Fake news vs fake history.

[vhcr]

It doesn't has to be expensive, the files could be chunked in 1-day chunks for example, and a hash of all of them computed with a merkle tree.

[ChainOfFools]

a number of projects aimed at this exact problem - one of them is/was called Tyrion - there were probably a dozen because the concept is quite obvious. but the usual blockchain problems frustrate its success, namely that blockchains are not independent of human control, but only obfuscate it behind unprovable promises of decentralization.

[orblivion]

I would think that's only a forward-facing problem. I.e. policies could change. But so long as the chain has not been corrupted, and assuming it was proof-of-work, couldn't you more or less prove that the chain going backwards has in fact not been corrupted? Though I suppose it might rely on a reliable account of the hashing power of the world at a given time.