Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Futuure – hash-certified public prediction store

futuu.re

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 62 posts

Re: Show HN: Futuure – hash-certified public prediction store

#51

Post by dnautics »

space_rock wrote: post #33
smt88 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can accomplish this with plain old cryptography. No blockchain needed. There are lots of ways to do it. One of them would be for Fuuture to publish the hash to literally anywhere. Public + cryptographically verifiable + distributed + append-only still does not equal blockchain, as long as we're defining blockchain as something that was not invented before 2009.

So these hashes are distributed. How do we know they haven't been altered since future reveal? How does one find the "true" dataset? Trust random people on the internet?

no, since it's public, if you care so much about it, you keep a periodic snapshot of the hashes. So you're trusting yourself (and math). What's missing to be a "blockchain" in (what should be) the generally accepted definition is byzantine fault tolerance.

Re: Show HN: Futuure – hash-certified public prediction store

#52

Post by rkangel »

se4u wrote: post #47

One alternative implementation of this which is very simple is as follows. 1. User makes a public declaration to always make a prediction using some platform. Like they release a tweet saying all future predictions will happen on futuu.re (or on a Blockchain) 2. They only release the sha hashes of their prediction to futuu.re, along with a date for that prediction, and users keep the true prediction with themselves.…

You would need some concept of published identity, otherwise they could just create their predictions against multiple different identities each with e.g. 10 predictions.

Re: Show HN: Futuure – hash-certified public prediction store

#53

Post by OJFord »

space_rock wrote: post #9

Blockchain is overhypered nonsense 99.9999% of the time. But seriously this is the one in a billion projects where you should use the Bitcoin blockchain as much as I hate to say it

There is (was?) a relatively popular Ethereum one isn't (wasn't) there?

Adding in the 'contracts' nature of it to commit to a wager on the prediction.

Re: Show HN: Futuure – hash-certified public prediction store

#54

Post by Moodles »

monkeydust wrote: post #39
Moodles wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly (and I hate saying this) but you could stick the hashes in a public blockchain and get clients to verify. But of course this would cost money and any Merkle tree would do, but I can’t believe I just non-ironically suggested a blockchain for something.

Ha, I was literally thinking the same thing. This bizarrely might be something suitable for a public blockchain and its not using it.

Keybase does something similar by sticking the Merkle tree root of hashes of signatures in the bitcoin blockchain: https://book.keybase.io/docs/crypto

Re: Show HN: Futuure – hash-certified public prediction store

#55

Post by se4u »

rkangel wrote: post #52
se4u wrote: post #47

One alternative implementation of this which is very simple is as follows. 1. User makes a public declaration to always make a prediction using some platform. Like they release a tweet saying all future predictions will happen on futuu.re (or on a Blockchain) 2. They only release the sha hashes of their prediction to futuu.re, along with a date for that prediction, and users keep the true prediction with themselves.…

You would need some concept of published identity, otherwise they could just create their predictions against multiple different identities each with e.g. 10 predictions.

So actually this wont be a problem. Basically if they do this then each account that they create will only have very few published predictions. So it will be like a coin which comes up head twice after two tosses. The public will not trust such accounts with low number of correct predictions.

To build trust you'd need to have a high count of revealed predictions in any given account.

That said people can try to game the system by uploading a very large number of predictions programmatically, so I think a rate throttling will have to be enforced. Any account can't make more than one prediction a day or something like that.

Also note that the issue you raised will also affect OP's implementation.

Re: Show HN: Futuure – hash-certified public prediction store

#56

Post by Moodles »

jpalomaki wrote: post #34
fluxinflex wrote: post #6

I wonder whether predictions (aka "poks") are stored in encrypted form in their database? Knowing what people think will happen in the future is obviously rather useful information.

It would be cool if there was a relatively reliable way of creating cryptographic "time capsules" that can be only opened at certain date in future. So something like, I encrypt message with a certain public key. The private key is guaranteed to only become available on 1st of January 2030.

There's this http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/RivestShamirWagner-timelo... which uses repeated squaring as a kind of unparallelizable searching function to force a set period of time until a solution is found.

I wonder if you could perhaps do a kind of Shamir secret sharing scheme where as long as most of the participants are honest, they all agree to piece together their shares of the secret at the specified time.

Re: Show HN: Futuure – hash-certified public prediction store

#57

Post by smt88 »

ginger_beer_m wrote: post #42
smt88 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can accomplish this with plain old cryptography. No blockchain needed. There are lots of ways to do it. One of them would be for Fuuture to publish the hash to literally anywhere. Public + cryptographically verifiable + distributed + append-only still does not equal blockchain, as long as we're defining blockchain as something that was not invented before 2009.

Once you're done building a working system to do the above, you'd have basically built a blockchain.

Using a very loose definition of blockchain, sure. For anything post-Satoshi, no.

The extra governance layer that makes it a blockchain is also not trivial.

Re: Show HN: Futuure – hash-certified public prediction store

#58

Post by jpdaigle »

renewiltord wrote: post #8

Cool stuff. Automates the process we do on Twitter where we post the hash and then a scheduled tweet revealing. Sadly, a list of hashes isn't that interesting. So it's not that interesting to read current list.

The one time I've tried doing this sort of "publish hash first, plaintext later" scheme, verification was hard because the hashing is vulnerable to whether or not the reader adds a newline after the text, a CR vs a CRLF, etc.

Re: Show HN: Futuure – hash-certified public prediction store

#59

Post by renewiltord »

jpdaigle wrote: post #58
renewiltord wrote: post #8

Cool stuff. Automates the process we do on Twitter where we post the hash and then a scheduled tweet revealing. Sadly, a list of hashes isn't that interesting. So it's not that interesting to read current list.

The one time I've tried doing this sort of "publish hash first, plaintext later" scheme, verification was hard because the hashing is vulnerable to whether or not the reader adds a newline after the text, a CR vs a CRLF, etc.

I think the best way is to post the command. So what I do is post

    printf "Hello World" | sha256sum

Re: Show HN: Futuure – hash-certified public prediction store

#60

Post by space_rock »

dnautics wrote: post #51
space_rock wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So these hashes are distributed. How do we know they haven't been altered since future reveal? How does one find the "true" dataset? Trust random people on the internet?

no, since it's public, if you care so much about it, you keep a periodic snapshot of the hashes. So you're trusting yourself (and math). What's missing to be a "blockchain" in (what should be) the generally accepted definition is byzantine fault tolerance.

Right so save some time and put the hashes in a Merkel tree and publish on the Bitcoin blockchain. Now the proof can be found trustlessly and the longest PoW points to the true dataset
Post reply on HN