Will UNCOPIED certificates, or the idea of it, survive the blaze of time?

Citing Hugo,

Three hundred and forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago to-day, the Parisians awoke to the sound of all the bells in the triple circuit of the city, the university, and the town ringing a full peal.

The sixth of January, 1482, is not, however, a day of which history has preserved the memory. There was nothing notable in the event which thus set the bells and the bourgeois of Paris in a ferment from early morning.

is a good start. In this first chapter, Hugo goes on describing the Great Hall of Paris and how it was lost to fire in 1618. On 15th of April 2019, we almost lost Notre-Dame de Paris to a fireblaze.

Today, we start the UNCOPIED blog on new platform - HUGO. Hugo is written in go, so is UNCOPIED server. So is Algorand the open source public blockchain we use for UNCOPIED certificates.

So GO, GO, GO … perhaps we should have named our project UNGOPIED, but it would sound funny (UN©PIED already sounds funny in French, a bit like : ONE FOOT).

We use chirographs to secure the authenticity of physical documents.

For security and redundancy, our chirographs have FIVE parts, which are cut manually using scissors from a single sheet of paper.

This first article will simply describe how we plan to protect your UNCOPIED certificates from FIRE. Let’s look at certificates of authenticity for artists, as an example.

UNCOPIED certificates are physical documents on paper : four certificate copies, each with a piece of paper attached from the original chirograph.

One copy is given to the artwork acquirer. One copy is retained by the creator for archiving. Two copies are sent to UNCOPIED’s PO Box.

Of those two copies, one copy it archived by UNCOPIED and the other copy is archived by a trusted third party specialized in physical archiving. Each country may have different level of requirements for such services, but all would require companies to take appropriate measures against FIRE, WATER or FRAUD. In France, for example, only twenty companies or so have accreditations to archive papers on behalf of the government. Each second certificate copy we receive in UNCOPIED PO Box is activated using the QR Code and then sent to such a long term archive.

Still, accidents can happen … Should such an accident happen, we would have to do with the other THREE physical certificate copies : the artwork owner’s, the artist’s personal copy or one of our own.

UNCOPIED certificates are valid for 10 years, which allows to adapt to whatever new technology will be available in 2031, as well as re-establish any missing physical redundancy.

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