Staking Claims with Scheduled Tweets

Twitter has a nifty new feature which allows you to schedule the publication of a Tweet. But, crucially, it doesn’t let the reader know when the message was originally written.

How can you, as a publisher, prove that you wrote a scheduled Tweet at a specific time?

Here’s one method.

1. Write a Tweet which contains a timestamp – “This is my message 2020-08-17”
2. Generate a hash of the message – SHA256: BAE149775399E3AEBC9DEF9D4D4468C9217593B58B76655F479C9CEE4FF73CBA
3. Post the hash to Twitter.
4. Schedule your message as a reply to the hash.

Here’s an example – check the dates:

Is this useful?

Probably not very useful. Here’s a couple of ideas.

Post your prediction for something, without influencing it. For example, the results of an election.

A sort of Dead Man’s Switch – a message to be sent when you’re not available.

It isn’t foolproof.

It’s really easy to screw up a hash. My first couple of experiments didn’t work because of errant whitespaces.

Modern hashes like SHA256 are probably resistant to collisions in Twitter’s limited message space.

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

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3hrKae4