Dropping Hashes (2020)

Before hashes existed, it wasn't unusual for scientists in the 17th and 18th century to drop an anagram instead, to establish priority on a discovery before one was ready to fully explain it. For example, in 1676 Hooke published an article containing the string of letters "ceiiinosssttuv", which two years later he revealed to stand for "ut tension, sic vis", meaning "as the extension, so the force".

The word "timestamping" doesn't appear anywhere in the blog post so here's a related link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping

And for historical trivia, the oldest blockchain via printed ads in NYTimes: https://www.vice.com/en/article/j5nzx4/what-was-the-first-bl...

And you have other timestamping services like GlobalSign and embedding data into bitcoin blockchain.

Having the hash at any given moment doesn’t prove that I had the file at that moment, but rather that someone had the file, generated the hash, and I have the hash. (This is obvious to most readers on HN, but might not be obvious to casual or non-specialist readers of Patrick’s article.)

As I understand him, there exists some reddit/twitter/mailinglist/other channel where people post messages like this:

  I am [Identity] and I claim hash [hex digits]
  [9 months pass]
  My claimed hash corresponds to [link], which proves I could have hacked [target] 9 months ago.

Can someone give a link to a real public communication channel like this? Or are these invite only?

I think this same technology is the basis for some cryptocurrency contracts which monetize claims on future events (prediction markets). The prediction is hashed and the topic is stored in a smart contract. Then, should the prediction be true, later the future-teller benefits from the counterparties' commitment to the opposite side of the contract.

Is this being posted because of this?

The Working Group's White paper on Japan and covid-19

https://www.kalzumeus.com/covid19-japan-white-paper/

Any updates on this paper and the eponymous group?

ipfs is great for this as it eliminates the manual file publishing and hash verification steps. you can publish the ipfs hash and when you want to disclose publicly, you can start providing the data on ipfs and everyone can download the file that belongs to the hash.

The usage of "dropping" is confusing here, and implies "stopping the usage of". If the author did not use a rare definition of "dropping" the post would have no purpose.

Given the hash, it may be possible to guess the contents of the file. A safer way:

  key=$(cat /dev/urandom | base64 | head -c 32)
  printf $key | b3sum --keyed secret.txt
  echo $key