#801: Proving What's Real In The Age Of AI with Bryan Jacoutot
October 14, 2026
AI Summary
5 min readProving What's Real In The Age Of AI
Bryan Jacoutot, a commercial litigator and Bitcoin advocate, walked into the intersection of two accelerating trends: generative AI's ability to fabricate convincing video, audio, and documents, and the legal system's growing inability to tell what's real. His proposed solution is surprisingly simple—hash digital files into Bitcoin's blockchain using the Open Timestamps protocol, creating a permanent, verifiable record of what a file looked like at a specific moment in time. "It's not bulletproof," he says, "but it gives you a fighting chance."
How Timestamping Works in Practice
The mechanism is straightforward. Any digital file—a contract, a surveillance video, an election record—can be reduced to a cryptographic hash (a short hexadecimal string) using SHA-256, the same algorithm that secures Bitcoin itself. That hash is then embedded into a Bitcoin transaction. Once confirmed in a block, it becomes an immutable timestamp proving two things: the exact contents of the file at that moment, and that those contents existed before that block was mined.
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What you'll learn
- 1 (01:17) **Bitcoin as a Timekeeping Tool for Digital Truth** - Brian Jacoutot introduces his work at the intersection of Bitcoin's blockchain and proving digital artifacts existed at a specific point in time, a crucial topic as AI advances.
- 2 (05:58) **How Open Timestamps Works on Bitcoin** - A clear, non-technical breakdown of the technical mechanism behind timestamping digital data into the Bitcoin blockchain.
- 3 (07:42) **Real-World Election Use: Guatemala & Screven County** - Concrete examples of how this technology has already been deployed to secure election integrity.
- 4 (10:20) **The New Frontier: Securing Dropbox Surveillance Video** - A forward-looking application of timestamping to prevent AI-generated disinformation in the 2026 election cycle.
- 5 (14:28) **Why This is a "Wildly Underappreciated" Solution** - Host Marty Bent emphasizes the profound implications of proving something existed at a certain time, especially as generative AI video becomes indistinguishable from reality.
- 6 (17:28) **Bringing the Standard to the Courtroom** - The conversation shifts to the legal system, where Brian and Rafael Cordon have submitted formal comments to the U.S. court system.
- 7 (20:47) **The Nightmare of Proving Digital Evidence in Court Today** - A stark look at the current, costly process of challenging digital evidence, which this proposal aims to fix.
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Show Notes
Bryan Jacoutot, commercial litigator at Clark Hill, joins Marty Bent to explain how Bitcoin timestamping through OpenTimestamps and SimpleProof can authenticate digital evidence in the age of generative AI deepfakes. They cover his proposed federal rules of evidence change, a rebuttable presumption of authenticity for hashed files, and how Screven County, Georgia hashes election results and drop box surveillance video into the Bitcoin blockchain. They also discuss FinCEN's retracted rule, the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, the Bank Secrecy Act, and truth decay.
Bryan on X: https://x.com/BryanJacoutot
Clark Hill: https://www.clarkhill.com/people/bryan-f-jacoutot/
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