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Comment by dave_sid | Hacker News Reader

This has a big flaw. If the future visitors copy all passwords to a usb stick and take it with them then anyone in the present time that gets a copy can pretend to be from the future. Worse still, everyone would believe the phoney future visitors without question.

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It would be good enough to know that there is at least one person somewhere who is actually from the future.

Yes but on that case the earlier suggestion of just asking them for a stock market prediction would be good enough without implementing the password system.

But then you have to wait for the stock market prediction to come true. Instead, since you already know your temporal password for the year, the proof would be immediately available.

Tomorrow's close should be good enough. Preferably for a mix of stocks or indices.

Yes tomorrow is okay

I'm pretty sure no-one from the future will have a way to plug his/hers mini-USB-XC or whatever the usb name will be at the time in the future (USB standards are just a mess).

I would expect a future that still has a copy of these passwords to be highly likely to have copies of the relevant standards.

I think you just found yourself a business opportunity :)

True. They would need to burn to a CD :-D

Do you think they'd still be using USB drives and bothering to keep track of antique passwords in the future?

There's a few reasons for that, including avoiding anachronisms for aesthetic purposes.

If it can happen, it will happen, all you need is a sample (in this case: number of people who know about the time traveler) large enough.

Time machines could be invented in the near future. In fact I am wholly unable to say one hasn't been invented already.

You may need to get an old usb stick from eBay. The good news is that they probably would be selling for quite cheap.

Unless they're priceless antiques of an age long gone and sell for millions of inflation and future currency exchange rate adjusted dollars

That’s a very good point.

Time travel and democratic governance are mutually incompatible.

Also lotteries.

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