Minting SCOTUS Documents
By using technologies such as IPFS and blockchains, we can preserve important data.
Today, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled today that Trump has a right to run even though, under the 14th Amendment, insurrectionists are not allowed to hold public office, finding that it is solely Congress’s discretion to determine who is and is not disqualified under that clause. Perhaps this is for the best – what would stop the GOP from lobbing entirely fake insurrection charges at Biden as a legal pretense for interference? – but the PDF the court published, as Mark Joseph Stern quickly found, had remnants of data suggesting that, in an earlier draft, some of the justices were at least partially dissenting.
This almost certainly is not any sort of conspiracy, and something simply caused the once dissenting judges to change their tune – perhaps even the potential of how it could be weaponized by Biden. One X user, PeriodicTweet, jokingly mused that, when that version of the PDF is taken down, perhaps the original could serve as a collectible NFT.
However, as utterly silly as PDFs as speculative investments would be, this does highlight another potential use-case of technologies like IPFS – which enables censorship-resistant and tamper-proof decentralized hosting of a file – and blockchains: preserving evidence in an immutable way. IPFS uses URLs with IDs in them that are hashes of the files being served, ensuring that, if even one bit of the files is changed, so must the URL. A court document that was likely modified for entirely benign reasons is a low-stakes use case of this concept, but it inspired me to explore how best to implement this.
Though a protocol or app built for such purposes might have a complex series of smart contracts, I quickly threw together a simple one that only mints a single tokenized version of the PDF named “Hidden Dissent” and published it to Optimism. I pinned both the original PDF file and a PNG of the first page on IPFS, referencing them in “animation_url” and “image” respectively in the JSON metadata. Though a PDF is hardly an animation, this is the only field in the metadata standard that loads things other than images, which has led to it being a catch-all for everything else.
Unfortunately, Chromium browsers are hell-bent on preventing the loading of the embedded PDF on OpenSea for security reasons, though Firefox, as of now, loads it fine. Regardless, the token does point to a particularly robustly stored version of the original file. As long as that PDF is seeded by someone on IPFS – which I plan to do indefinitely – the file will be recoverable, and there’s not much anyone can do about it. The “external_url” field points to the file’s location on the Supreme Court’s servers and, if the file is taken down, will ultimately become a dead link. However, were this to happen, it only further underscores the value in the IPFS version of the file.
Blockchain transactions can serve the function of immutably establishing identity and time. No one can change the information on-chain about when a document is published and, as long as the publisher keeps the cryptographic keys of their wallet safe – admittedly no small infosec challenge – it will be provably tied to their identity. This can even be an anonymous identity if someone wishes to build up a reputation as a source while keeping their real-life identity secret.
Ultimately, while this served as little more than an idle afternoon experiment, it serves as a proof of concept of how these technologies can be used to preserve and record critical information that might otherwise be erased. As the tide of authoritarianism rises, this will be increasingly important.
Links
PDF on IPFS.io (CID: QmYTEeiAMRM4wm6dhwbpeyADGmBonZYCXbeteAr2cTmqBN)