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The problem with this approach for many applications is that you can potentially publish many messages and then only tell any about the ones you want to 'keep'. For instance if you want to predict an election outcome, publish hashes for both outcomes under different names and then only tell people about the winning one later on.

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This is where reputation becomes important. Attach your name to a public message and hash and it’s easy to verify that you didn’t predict both outcomes. Continuing to use the same channel over time provides further weight.

The flip side of this is so many people make so many predictions that getting any one the correct is effectively meaningless most of the time. Essentially, you need a long string of public predictions on a single channel for it to be meaningful anyway.

It used to be a common email scam that you’d make two opposite market predictions and send them as free advice. Then you’d do the same thing the next month, but only send to the people who received the “correct” first message. And again. And again. And when you had “proven” yourself all-knowing to a small group of people, you’d start charging them.

Which is why being public is so important for these things.

Derren Brown did this with horse races IIRC for a TV show.

https://derrenbrown.co.uk/shows/the-system/

Can confirm. Learned something from that.

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