Proof of Novelty

Daniel Severo

Abstract: We propose a design for securing novelty of archived content in distributed ledgers, called Proof of Novelty. What constitutes as novel is decided through a consensus mechanism together with a similarity function, which is selected according to the content type (e.g. full-motion videos, textual documents). Scalability is guaranteed by forming a validation committee with cryptographic sortition, which use statistical hypothesis testing to decide on the probability of a content being novel or not. The system can trade-off computational with statistical performance by manipulating parameters. We discuss the usage of this design to secure the novelty of full-motion videos and end with a proposal of future lines of research that can extend the systems capabilities.