If the commitment uses a salt, it won’t be possible for anyone to verify guesses before Alice publishes the reveal message (which would include the salt). In a

If the commitment uses a salt, it won’t be possible for anyone to verify guesses before Alice publishes the reveal message (which would include the salt). In any case, the blog post has Alice rewarding whoever comes closest, not whoever guesses the exact value. For a sufficiently large range of numbers (e.g. 128 bits), you wouldn’t really need a salt since the probability of anyone guessing the exact value would be negligible.