On-Chain Timestamps Are Accurate

ePrint Report: On-Chain Timestamps Are Accurate

Apostolos Tzinas, Srivatsan Sridhar, Dionysis Zindros

When Satoshi Nakamoto introduced Bitcoin, a central tenet was that the blockchain functions as a timestamping server. In the Ethereum era, smart contracts widely assume on-chain timestamps are mostly accurate. In this paper, we prove this is indeed the case, namely that recorded timestamps do not wildly deviate from real-world time, a property we call timeliness. Assuming a global clock, we prove that all popular mechanisms for constructing …

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