Staking Claims with Scheduled Tweets(shkspr.mobi)

36 pointsby edent6 tahun yang lalu30 comments

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/08/staking-claims-with-scheduled-tweets/

32 comments

avmich6 tahun yang lalu

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

tarasmatsyk6 tahun yang lalu

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

edent6 tahun yang lalu

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

renewiltord6 tahun yang lalu

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).

appleflaxen6 tahun yang lalu

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

mdonahoe6 tahun yang lalu

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

mdonahoe6 tahun yang lalu

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

MaximumYComb6 tahun yang lalu

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.

bluesign6 tahun yang lalu

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

bluesign6 tahun yang lalu

Not even in 1000 years, it is 33 digits :)

renewiltord6 tahun yang lalu

An old trick to make predictions without influencing the outcome:

E.g. https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1017575588641505280?s=20

0823498723498726 tahun yang lalu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anagram#Establishment_of_prior...

renewiltord6 tahun yang lalu

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

bluesign6 tahun yang lalu

Yeah the key point is:

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

lopmotr6 tahun yang lalu

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.

tony1016 tahun yang lalu

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

conroy6 tahun yang lalu

patio11 wrote about “dropping hashes” here: https://www.kalzumeus.com/essays/dropping-hashes/

ForHackernews6 tahun yang lalu

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.

vosper6 tahun yang lalu

> 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?

bryanrasmussen6 tahun yang lalu

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

bryanrasmussen6 tahun yang lalu

you laugh but I have periodically thought about making a prediction service and considered that blockchain of course would be a good verification - however after playing with it in my head I can never figure out a way to monetize it adequately to pay back the effort required, as the only people I can think would actually want to use the service are paranoid know-it-all jerks like me who want to show everyone how right they are - and I know for a fact I'm too cheap to pay for that service.

dennis-tra6 tahun yang lalu

I‘m working for a blockchain-backed secure timestamping service

https://documents.originstamp.com/

Also wrote a CLI:

https://github.com/dennis-tra/originstamp-cli

ShuckSchu6 tahun yang lalu

reckter6 tahun yang lalu

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 huner54652&e") Worked great for that proof :)

paulgb6 tahun yang lalu

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?

raghavtoshniwal6 tahun yang lalu

I made something that does this some time back: https://tweetencryptor.netlify.app/

gberger6 tahun yang lalu

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?

edent6 tahun yang lalu

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.

[deleted]6 tahun yang lalu

gruez6 tahun yang lalu

>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".

[deleted]6 tahun yang lalu

pmiller26 tahun yang lalu

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.