[gwern]

Reading through http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2010-March/0...

Managing a site through a DVCS is, IMO, a good idea. (I do it for my own site, http://www.gwern.net/ ). But I think your worries are somewhat groundless. If you are interested in preventing patent problems years down the line, there's no need for fancy cryptographic commitment schemes; you could probably just appeal to archive sites like the Internet Archive or WebCitation. When you access their archived pages, the pages come with timestamps in the frame or as part of the URL.

To some extent, you are already doing this: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://lists.canonical.org/pipe...

(I know that the Internet Archive has been used by some courts for one purpose or another, though I don't know that it has been employed for demonstrating prior art.)

That said, if you investigated existing cryptographic time-stamping services (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping#External_l...) and figured out how to integrate them into a DVCS (a shell script called from cron?), I would certainly find that an interesting thing to read on Hacker News.