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Sidenote, but I love how the author used Twitter as a way to prove they had this information in the past.

Is this a common strategy now for proving timestamps?




It sometimes happens in various scenes (I specifically recall PS3) where people post hashes of proof of some various hack/achievement/etc that is private for whatever reason. They want to be able to claim "first" if someone else finds the same hack later. Hashes of keys were posted for the PS3.


Wasn't the old version of this trick sending the information in a well sealed envelope through the mail to get a dated postmark? More than 140 characters but you can only prove it once by unsealing the envelope!


You could tweet the cryptographic hash of a piece of information longer than 140 characters to prove that it existed at a certain time.


I never understood this trick. Surely you could just mail an empty envelope ahead of time for the postmark, then put whatever you wanted to prove in it later?


I think the idea is that you keep it sealed until it is needed, then open it in some way that creates a legally admissible proof of the contents (maybe opened by a notary or something; and examined for postmark/envelope tampering by some sort of expert in that field, who can testify his training leads him to believe it is authentic.)


Bitcoin would also work. It's made for that kind of thing.




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