
Staking Claims with Scheduled Tweets - edent
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/08/staking-claims-with-scheduled-tweets/
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renewiltord
An old trick to make predictions without influencing the outcome:

E.g.
[https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1017575588641505280?s=20](https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1017575588641505280?s=20)

~~~
082349872349872
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anagram#Establishment_of_prior...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anagram#Establishment_of_priority)

~~~
renewiltord
Very cool old-school way. I also like the attempts at reverse engineering that
led to the wrong interpretations but which were _true results_!

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gberger
Why do you need the date in the reply tweet?

-

As I understand it, the premise of the method is that, at day D, you already
have written the contents of tweet Tr (to be posted as a reply to T) and so
you can already compute its hash and tweet the hash as part of T on day D.
Then on day D+N, you tweet Tr, which hashes correctly to what you said it
would, and thus is extremely unlikely to have been tampered with.

Where does the date string contained in Tr come into play?

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edent
Human readability. You are correct that the existence of the hash shows when
the original message was written. But for human readability and understanding,
I thought it was useful to have.

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reckter
Niantic (The Company behind Pokemon Go and Ingress) would do something similar
for events in Ingress: They had a "measurement window", in which they would
look at the state of the gameboard in a certain city and count stats (details
irrelevant for the story here). The measurement window was 10 minutes long,
but they would look randomly at one specific second and count the state at
that second. Before each measurement window they would post a SHA hash on
their twitter account, and release the string that lead to it afterwards
(which was a bunch of garbage and a time like this: "52o5dfeis(}
_)5eidfjsdkdbn 10:03:20 huner5465_ 2&e") Worked great for that proof :)

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paulgb
This sounds very interesting but I'm a little confused by the problem they
were trying to solve -- what were they trying to prove knowledge of?

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conroy
patio11 wrote about “dropping hashes” here:
[https://www.kalzumeus.com/essays/dropping-
hashes/](https://www.kalzumeus.com/essays/dropping-hashes/)

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gruez
>Modern hashes like SHA256 are probably resistant to collisions in Twitter’s
limited message space.

Actually, no. 140 characters alphanumeric translates to 833 bits of entropy.
This is significantly more than the 256 bits in SHA256, and due to the
pigeonhole principle, collisions are guaranteed. That said, it's still
nontrivial to bruteforce the hash, because searching thorough 256 bits is
hard, but that's unrelated to the "limited message space".

~~~
pmiller2
Collisions are guaranteed, yes, but, you also have to keep in mind that the
only collisions that matter are the _interesting_ ones. That is, collisions
between two different messages written in different languages, and where both
messages make some sort of sense. Although I don't have a mathematical proof
of it, I'd have to wager that those types of collisions are exceedingly rare.

Edit: At least "exceedingly rare within the space of plain-text messages
smaller than N characters," for some reasonable value of N.

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bluesign
Yeah the key point is:

‘ And, of course, a person can post two hashes – for contradictory messages –
and only publish replies one of them. ‘

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lopmotr
Perhaps also state when the reply is coming in the initial tweet so if you
don't meet your deadline, people can assume you decided to hide it.

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tonyztan
Someone can also decide to simply delete their tweet. Unless you were closely
monitoring the account, you wouldn't know.

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raghavtoshniwal
I made something that does this some time back:
[https://tweetencryptor.netlify.app/](https://tweetencryptor.netlify.app/)

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tarasmatsyk
Smart,

what about using words (like a password phrase) instead of a hash? You can
schedule title of the upcoming tweet, so people can like it and "subscribe" to
notifications

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edent
I'm not sure of any hashing algorithms which use words as their output. Or
have I misunderstood your comment?

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renewiltord
It's just a byte string converted to a hex string commonly. Chunk it into
quads of hex and you can index into a 65k dictionary (the OED has more than
twice that).

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appleflaxen
even better than a dictionary: use dicewords, which have already mapped
numbers to a canonical list of words.

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mdonahoe
My critique of this blogpost will have the sha-256
hash:2738490299aeefee10202fa46283bc856

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mdonahoe
I’ll post in 25 years in the future once I brute force this hash.

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MaximumYComb
There's actually an unlimited number of messages that will result in that
hash. For all we know, that sha will also result from the hashing of "I'm a
giant idiot" repeated an enormous number of times. I'd hazard a guess that
there is probability 1 that this is the case.

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bluesign
Unless it is super long, I guess chance of not getting the original message by
brute force is super super low

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avmich
A company which specializes on message integrity... surety.com

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ForHackernews
Why would you use twitter for something like this when you could simply create
a blockchain DAPP that runs on Ethereum? All you'd need to do is learn the
Solidity language, compile it with Mist and purchase some initial startup gas
to pay for the executions. Then, the integrity of your predictions would be
guaranteed by a globally distributed network of several mining organizations,
rather than dependent on one politically-suspect US tech company.

This seems like an ideal use-case for verifiable blockchain-backed
applications.

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vosper
> Why would you use twitter for something like this when you could simply

Ok, go on

> create a blockchain DAPP that runs on Ethereum? All you'd need to do is
> learn the Solidity language, compile it with Mist and purchase some initial
> startup gas to pay for the executions.

So much simpler than tweeting!

> globally distributed network of several mining organizations, rather than
> dependent on one politically-suspect US tech company.

Yup, those reliable and impartial miners that noone really knows who they are,
but we’re 200% sure they’re not mostly in China and could absolutely never be
influenced by Chinese authorities?

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bryanrasmussen
I'm pretty sure the parent poster's tongue was cutting a hole through their
cheek when writing the post.

