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by alphabeat 5640 days ago
Maybe they wrote a different value on each document as a fingerprint of sorts. Or maybe they just expected this to get out.
2 comments

Probably the second one. Financial documents are typically prepared by lawyers and bankers, not cryptographers.

Or he asked his friend, "hey, can I see your document... yup, they're identical" and then leaked with impunity. If the public really wants something, and you send a document with that information on it to a bunch of people, it's going to be leaked. I think Goldman is smart enough to realize this; the buzz is helping their business, but they knew they would get in trouble if they just announced the numbers. So they just gave it to random people with a I-did-my-due-diligence-NDA and let entropy take care of the rest.

Hopefully the leaker was smart enough to perturb the values somewhat as well :)