I like how this aspect of nomic feels like Poker lol. On Fri, Sep 8, 2017 at 2:02 AM, Owen Jacobson <o...@grimoire.ca> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 8, 2017 at 9:53 AM, Owen Jacobson <o...@grimoire.ca> wrote: > > > $ echo 'It is possible to win by destroying Stamps in the possession of > others' | shasum -a 256 > > 204aa33ed7c42e58d6f391b3878dc89738c8a1bb95b39b3ebcda2609c1fabe3c - > > On Sep 7, 2017, at 7:55 PM, VJ Rada <vijar...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Can you explain to a technological neophate how to decrypt that? > > It’s not really encryption, so you can’t decrypt it. The idea is that the > ‘sha256’ algorithm takes a document as input, and produces an opaque value > as output. The output value has the interesting property that if two > outputs are equal, it is nearly certain[0] that the inputs are equal. > > Yesterday, I said I knew something whose SHA256 hash is > 204aa33ed7c42e58d6f391b3878dc89738c8a1bb95b39b3ebcda2609c1fabe3c. > > Today, I provided the input document, and a command you can use to verify > that it has the same hash. This means it’s almost certainly the same > document I already knew, yesterday - you can verify it yourself, without > having to have access to either a time machine or psychic powers. > > Gaelan did a similar thing, though he used a larger hash. > > -o > > [0] Specifically, given to arbitrary documents as inputs, there is a 1 in > 115,792,089,237,316,195,423,570,985,008,687,907,853,269, > 984,665,640,564,039,457,584,007,913,129,639,936 chance that they have the > same SHA256 hash. For all intents and purposes, unless there’s an > as-yet-undiscovered weakness in the algorithm, a SHA256 hash uniquely > identifies a document. >
