Hey, looks like I have written something like this too! But mine actually worked via a cryptocurrency for zero fees (that's the main part!)

You might be wondering how and I am always more than happy to tell more about it.

I want to tell something which I haven't shared anywhere else till now about why I made nanotimestamps.

I made it because I was thinking of walloftext.com, I wanted a way where people can create any /<something> and then since WOT doesn't contain timestamp capabilities that made me wonder if timestamps can be embedded in just text itself.

I wanted to create a link shortener service on top of walloftext.com itself which could be written anonymously on. I wanted to create a simple link shortener anonymously as I saw dub.sh made it require a sign up for one of my projects or similar (I was thinking of anonymous ways to create content and post them, like after anonfiles had shut down basically I wanted to create a more resilient form, I only used anonfiles rarely when sending files and I really loved its unlimited egress/ingress and It made me feel like a lot of the services we use are kind of centralized so is there a more decentralized way)

I always thought about cryptocurrency being able to do this and looked out for an idea to find out that there was this one called bitcointimestamps

Being the frugal and being on a good chunk of curiosity imparted partially by hackernews spirit, I decided to look for alternative ideas and found that in nano you can send transactions for 0 gas fees.

Now the question becomes on how to embed hash or just simply data in nano chain and that data would have a timestamp effectively timestamping that a particular person created something text (the WOT accomplished)

I thought of lots of ideas but in the end I found some nano vanity generator and ended up splitting a text into bunch of small texts (4-5 chars) and then create nano-vanity with that and then loop the transaction around it for completely zero fees (except some work function which nano requires but I do feel like it was a worthwhile tradeoff for an idea like this)

The idea is to create completely permanent and decentralized permanent storage for essentially free other than some compute of work function yourself.

I vibe coded a basic idea hooking all of this idea into something to create a prototype (without using any agents, I just copy paste the code and still do just from browsers, they are pretty good honestly and completely free)

I was being stuck on the primitive part on creating the establishment of the transaction loop so I contacted some person on nano's discord and they gave me domain and some help in it too!

I do believe that my idea has potential and I had built this almost an year ago. The idea has been in the back burner for so long & at this point, what I had built was a good prototype which I am proud of. But I don't know how to add effective value of it or (should I?) because I am the type of person who doesn't know how to monetize such a project or if its even possible and I don't want to take this idea which has great potential and make it muddle up with VC money or similar.

I want the community to build ideas on top of it and I can integrate more of my thinking or help other companies if they are interested in thinking something like this comes to my mind which seems to be the most sustainable way to manage things (I don't want to ruin a project with VC money and be like rest of crypto industry, sorry I didn't want to create a crypto project I just ended up building one after my WOT idea)

Honestly my initial idea had nothing to do with this. I just went one stack down the layer down the layer, my initial idea was pretty simple but I ended up trying the most complex solution just because I was curious and that did end up to something which then fascinated me for atleast a month just on its own.

I really like your post and I think you might like nanotimestamps as well

https://github.com/SerJaimeLannister/nanotimestamp/blob/main...

There is both video and gif format available. (I am gonna create a wiki right now to upload a video) Remind me if I forget to do so because honestly I am just happy that I am able to make this. I don't want more except the community to hack things with this idea.

Sorry if it sounds like a promotion but I earn nothing except some pride and smile while I am writing this!! Knowing that because I remember when I was thinking about this, I couldn't even comprehend telling it to my school friends or even one of my more coding focused group friend. I was alone lol with just internet. I hate AI but prototyping it was a good use of it imo! But it also gave me imposter syndrome as if it was AI which developed it and not me and that's partially true so I just take credit of an idea perhaps not the implementation so much.

Edit: looks like I got downvoted and I can understand the statement, trust me I hate crypto just as much as you do and I have written about this as well https://justforhn.mataroa.blog/blog/most-crypto-is-doomed-to...

I hope I don't give the impression that crypto is anything good for 99.9% use cases especially for the average person and in this case I do feel like its the 0.1% but please remember that Crypto's kind of stupid for most use cases. Source actually built something in it and I can only count on one hand (5 projects) at max which are net positive itself, maybe even less. So my point is, please don't invest in crypto & we can still play around with crypto (I didn't pay anything to work with this) & just invest in world index funds most likely instead of crypto. I hope Hackernews realizes that I built this actively trying to avoid crypto-space but it seemed too elegant to ignore in this context but I hate scams and I am a huge coffeezilla subscriber. Hope it provides additional context I guess and have a nice day y'all!