The interesting thing about anti-fraud efforts like OpenTimestamps is often what they achieve is invisible, because they've discouraged fraud from happening at all.

I've experienced this myself: I was plaintiff in a lawsuit where timestamped evidence was damming to the defendant. Even though the evidence didn't have digital signatures, the defense didn't even try to contest the validity of it. I'm sure the timestamps helped them make that decision.

Previously in Guatemala, the timestamps on the tally sheets in the election did two main things:

1) They showed they the vast majority of tally sheets were filled out soon after the election officially ended, contesting claims of widespread fraud.

2) A significant subset of tally sheets had incorrect metadata times in the computer system that scanned them due to a timezone misconfiguration. OpenTimestamps provided evidence that this was just a timezone misconfiguration, not fraud, and the judiciary in the end accepted that evidence. 

 this is pretty good to learn  

 Friend of mine recently asked what bitcoin and zkp’s do for elections, and I realized I’m not as fully informed as I’d like to be. There any best resources you could point to?
How active is that area of study? We currently seeing innovation/unsolved problems? 

 Thats an intrestin example! Is there anywhere a collection of legal cases using timestamps as proof? 
Regardless of what we think of immaterial rights especially patents should always make timestamps. 

 I'm not aware of any legal cases where _timestamps_ were publicly used, even though guardtime has been around since forever. My suspicion is that it's good enough evidence that no-one even tries to dispute timestamps.  

 FWIW, MD5 Hashes are routinely used on electronic discovery platforms to ensure the documents produced/received are the same documents later presented as evidence. 

 I'd add that it rarely comes up in litigation, but MD5 hashs are often created as a matter of course at the point the document touches the e-discovery platform.