Can you give me a concrete example of something someone might want to write down, not share, and later prove they thought of in advance, not for the prediction-y qualities
Sure, here are three, wanting to show you’d thought about something in advance for various reasons:
Alice notices an unfixable vulnerability that would cause a website to go down. Drawing attention to it would have no benefit, but she hides an explanation so that if someone takes down the website, (1) she gets credit for noticing it and (2) she better helps others understand what happened (the fact that she wrote in advance about the website going down, and then the website went down, means people should pay more attention to her explanation).
Bob anticipates a situation (that others don’t anticipate that he anticipates), writes a personal policy on what to do in that situation, and publishes the hash (along with many other hashes). If he acts on that policy, he can prove that he wrote the policy in advance. He can’t prove that he didn’t write alternatives, but he can prove he considered the situation in advance, which is sometimes sufficient.
Carol is contemplating taking a unilateral action. She shares a hash. Now if she takes the unilateral action later, she can prove that she carefully thought about it well in advance. And regardless, if the possibility of the action becomes obvious, she can prove she thought of it before it became obvious.
Also—is there a reason I should believe that if all did go according to plan, when you revealed your message, you would also have said “if all had not gone according to plan, I would not have revealed this message”?
Well, I know that the message says things like “if you’re reading this then …” and asserts things about the past that did not come to pass. But I can’t easily prove that to you, no.
Note also that I mentioned that this whole hash-sharing thing wasn’t actually necessary for what I was doing.
Sure, here are three, wanting to show you’d thought about something in advance for various reasons:
Alice notices an unfixable vulnerability that would cause a website to go down. Drawing attention to it would have no benefit, but she hides an explanation so that if someone takes down the website, (1) she gets credit for noticing it and (2) she better helps others understand what happened (the fact that she wrote in advance about the website going down, and then the website went down, means people should pay more attention to her explanation).
Bob anticipates a situation (that others don’t anticipate that he anticipates), writes a personal policy on what to do in that situation, and publishes the hash (along with many other hashes). If he acts on that policy, he can prove that he wrote the policy in advance. He can’t prove that he didn’t write alternatives, but he can prove he considered the situation in advance, which is sometimes sufficient.
Carol is contemplating taking a unilateral action. She shares a hash. Now if she takes the unilateral action later, she can prove that she carefully thought about it well in advance. And regardless, if the possibility of the action becomes obvious, she can prove she thought of it before it became obvious.
Well, I know that the message says things like “if you’re reading this then …” and asserts things about the past that did not come to pass. But I can’t easily prove that to you, no.
Note also that I mentioned that this whole hash-sharing thing wasn’t actually necessary for what I was doing.