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Comment by teravor | Hacker News Reader

if you fancy a potential career as a whitleblower, you should consider writing what you know when you know it and secretly publishing commitment hashes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commitment_scheme). it's much more credible and unassailable when the charge that the claims were made long after the fact for specific purposes is impossible. keep the relevant info in a dedicated password manager vault.

a way to secretly publish commitment hashes is to deposit some small amount of crypto into an address and use that address to embed the hashes into the blockchain (either as metadata or just destroying some crypto a few cents a time). it is important to string all the commitments together in some way (such as coming from the same address) otherwise there could be some doubt about the strategy (for example, spraying claims and disclosing only the ones you want to).

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> if you fancy a potential career as a whitleblower,…

Most people don’t fancy a career as a whistleblower. They get their morals pushed further and further until they finally decide it is too much and they take the risk to their life and prosperity.

> it's much more credible and unassailable when the charge that the claims were made long after the fact for specific purposes is impossible.

If someone actually joined an org with plans to be a whistleblower I assume people complaining about whistleblowers trustworthiness would then be complaining that it was all lies because they always planned on leaking information.

>If someone actually joined and org with plans to be a whistleblower

Yeah, I mean that's just espionage and should raise your standard of evidence for any claim made. The credibility of whistleblowers comes partly from the idea that they basically believe in the org's mission and were working sincerely to achieve it until they discovered information that they had a higher moral duty to report on. If they came in already believing it was illegitimate and their goal was to find dirt to expose, then you know they were already comfortable with one act of deception and you should consider that they might be comfortable with a second. It's the same heuristic that says not to take Project Veritas videos at face value.

Or, you know, just use a service intended for this purpose:

https://timestamp.stanford.edu/

If it's sensitive enough to bother with hashing like this, its probably too sensitive for depending on any particular host. Not that I have anything against Stanford in particular but I don't know who maintains that server or how easy they would be to compel.

It's a pity that money poisoned blockchains for general use because they make a lot of sense in cases like this.

Has anyone created a tool for easily doing this? Imagine if all the Virginia Guiffres of the world created crypto-provable diaries they could later reveal.

i imagine if someone were to make it, it would need to import a private key and export transactions to be manually published as building a crypto wallet around the concept would be too much.

someone who can navigate that process can just use txt files and sha256sum and whatever poweruser wallet they are already using. this isn't a mass market appeal activity, someone serious about it will put in the time to learn if they were inclined to do this.

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