[sjs382]

It's fairly common (at least among the security community) to post a hash of a claim to Twitter, that they can reference in the future to prove that they had X information on Y date without disclosing the actual information until later.

For example, I could post the hash "9712f2488fa00fc5b11b657995ac10c9" to Twitter and then after the prediction comes to pass, I can reveal that the hash was for the phrase "Pittsburgh Steelers will Defeat New Orleans Saints 30-21 in Super Bowl LIII", proving that I had some knowledge or prediction that I didn't want to reveal at the time of the prediction.

[blocked_again]

Wait but this is not fail proof right. For example I can post that Kolkata Knight riders will defeat Mumbai Indians along with a post that Mumbai Indians will defeat Kolkata Knight riders and delete the wrong twitter post once the competetion is over?

[logfromblammo]

Presumably, one can assume that once it is published publicly, someone else could make a note of it, and tattle on the author whenever they delete a hash without revealing the source of it.

In practice, nobody is attending to anyone that closely, aside from a handful of public figures, and shenanigans like those you described might actually work to get someone more attention, only to fail once they have enough. That's why a publication mechanism that disallows deletions is desirable for such hashes.

[sorokod]

How is this similar to:

"Instead of posting customer hashes to a public digital ledger, Surety creates a unique hash value of all the new seals added to the database each week and publishes this hash value in the New York Times. The hash is placed in a small ad in the Times classified section under the heading “Notices & Lost and Found” and has appeared once a week since 1995." ?

[ChrisClark]

How is it similar? I think we could rephrase it.

- Post a hash of a document to Twitter.

- Put a hash of a document in an ad in the NYT.

Quite similar.