Earlier quoted context omitted.
With the scheme given, it's no challenge to prove that you wrote it down. Write down every possible winner of the 2020 Presidential election in an envelope. Include people who are still massively long-shot candidates and not even running right now, like Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama. Provide whatever proof you like that you wrote these down today. Throw away everything that doesn't fit in another year and a few mo…
> Provide whatever proof you like that you wrote these down today... This scheme generates the proof that you wrote it down early But what proof is there? Newspaper clippings from today's news in the envelope? That's hardly conclusive proof it was written on that day. One solution would be to encode the prophecy into a blockchain, and reference that in the envelope. This way there's multiple witnesses that you did so…
That's the basic scheme. Variants on this idea have been in use for centuries. Modern hash schemes, including those used in the blockchains, make it trivial, albeit at the price of byte-for-byte precision; you just have to provide reasonable evidence that something existed at some point in time, which is easy with twitter, facebook, google, and literally thousands of other places you can stick arbitrary content that will end up with a timestamp that you can reasonably claim you have no ability to forge.