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Comment by headsoup | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what the value proposition is here. Is the idea that you want to use this later to tell others you had the idea first, or to protect your IP?

If so, I could definitely see people noting every conceivable idea they can imagine to claim rights later

... Otherwise, is it because I don't trust my past self to be accurate?

Or to prove to 3rd parties you absolutely did what you said you did at a time? In which case it's not private.

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In some patent law jurisdictions, date of invention trumps date of filing if you can show evidence.

Hence my comment on people spamming ideas to front-run it.

Other than that, I can't really see a need for this that is for private use.

I want to show everyone how smart I am about predicting current events, or prove that I knew some secret event happened, without my prediction causing interference.

You can just publish encrypted text as a GitHub gist (or use any other large public site where you can't modify the timestamps), and then release the decryption keys later.

Or only publish a hash that used some collision-resistant function (future proof), and then publish the text that matches the hash later. For this, you can just tweet it, or write it into a HN comment.

$2a$12$0qd0ztFAO5XAjQ.HRDMxjeS3n6tsemeHfWfWO0MIBR0mwFfmyp2RO

Actually there is no where left in the world where this is the case. USA was the last country to use first to invent and we switched away in the mid 2000s

Interestingly enough this was the last time I was being taught basic patent law at University!

There were also a lot of carve outs that got things grandfathered into the first to invent rules. But at this point it’s pretty much completely gone.

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