I wrote a haiku
to run through a hash function
and send to strangers.
Every time this document is run through a particular function, it returns:
> d15396b27a2b176e6315c9fbbec09e2c2e042e595755902e5ff5eccec1ca634b
If I changed a single character of the document, the function would return an entirely different string.
This means it's very, very difficult to come up with another document that returns the same string when run through this same function.
If I sent my string to a bunch of strangers, they wouldn't know what my haiku is. To find it out, they would have to run through every possible document ever written (and that ever could be written) to hope to return the string.
But if someone decided to say they wrote my haiku, I could prove I wrote it first by showing that the document returns the unique string that I sent off to strangers.
What this service provides is a way of making it easy for strangers to store and date these strings for me, because they're doing it anyway when they're using Bitcoins.
> d15396b27a2b176e6315c9fbbec09e2c2e042e595755902e5ff5eccec1ca634b
If I changed a single character of the document, the function would return an entirely different string.
This means it's very, very difficult to come up with another document that returns the same string when run through this same function.
If I sent my string to a bunch of strangers, they wouldn't know what my haiku is. To find it out, they would have to run through every possible document ever written (and that ever could be written) to hope to return the string.
But if someone decided to say they wrote my haiku, I could prove I wrote it first by showing that the document returns the unique string that I sent off to strangers.
What this service provides is a way of making it easy for strangers to store and date these strings for me, because they're doing it anyway when they're using Bitcoins.