Friday, May 26, 2017

The Envelope, Please

Yes, really, actually. There's a kind of system that should exist, but that doesn't really seem to, and I want it to.

The system is roughly analogous to e.g. Academy Award Winners being kept in a sealed envelope in a locked safe until it's time to open them. That is, the user should be able to put a particular piece of information into a particular envelope/safe and have it remain secret until a particular time, at which time it becomes public -- and have it be reasonably verifiable that the information was not changed or tampered with.

Yes, I know that this is doable by, for example, encrypting a message and signing it with PGP.

But I want a simple web-based system for use in friendly game or prediction applications. It doesn't have to withstand the NSA, it just has to be a good bet that it won't be casually compromiseable.

For example, I want to be able to do something like this:

In another venue, dL writes "Anyone against nuclear disarmament is simply NOT a libertarian. Period."

Do you think I agree with him or not? And why?

I've already written down the answers to those two questions, and can't change them (here's where I point at the mechanism I describe to explain why). You'll see my answers at 5pm tomorrow, so let's see who can Guess Tom's Attitude!

That would be fun, and it would enable easy/casual prize games/bets as well. I assumed something like it -- an out of the box script or site, not just the tools with which one could probably be build -- existed, but I'm not finding it.

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