4 ms·

Ignoring the butterfly effect issue, I would have said just pick the title of a given newspaper on a given date as the password.

rvnx 2y ago
or the concatenation of the lottery numbers for day A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H A bit disappointed by the article: the top upvoted answers there are literally a repetition of what ChatGPT says to do :|
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
  Alerting the course of human history by gifting baubles from the future. Lottery numbers will not be stable.
Vecr 2y ago
That's probably crackable with enough effort though. A huge effort, but it might be practical for a team of governments if they knew the person was a time traveler.
- kmoser 2y ago
  You could add more entropy by including not just the headline but an assortment of text from other pages, e.g. market price of whatever stock is listed on page X, the 10th sentence on page Y, etc.
adrianmonk 2y ago
If you can ignore the butterfly effect, I'd use the last digit of the closing price of 100 different stocks. Stock prices are hard to predict in the first place[1]. And the last digit will be the hardest digit to predict. --- [1] You could get very rich if you knew how. Lots of people want to be rich, yet basically nobody is doing it successfully.
- 9dev 2y ago
  Even if you could: your actions based on that knowledge would alter the price again, such that any method you devise to predict stock prices will a) have to factor that into its calculations and b) by definition will only work for a single user.
tzs 2y ago
Depending on how time travel works that might have a huge hole. 1. You pick a hash of the headline from the January 14th 2030 of the Springfield Shopper as your key and encrypt some data. 2. You use your time machine to send the encrypted data to someone in 2024 with instructions telling them how to recover the key, expecting that they will have to wait until January 14th 2030. 3. Some rich person decides they do not want to wait. They notice that January 14th is National Hot Pastrami Sandwich Day [1]. 4. They buy the Springfield Shopper and institute a policy that every year on January 14th the headline will be "Happy National Hot Pastrami Sandwich Day!". 5. If we are in the kind of universe where time travel to the past can affect the time that the time traveler came from their actions in #4 make it so "Happy National Hot Pastrami Sandwich Day!" is the headline you used. 6. In 2024 they try to decrypt the data using a hash of "Happy National Hot Pastrami Sandwich Day!" and it works. [1] https://www.daysoftheyear.com/days/hot-pastrami-sandwich-day/ https://www.daysoftheyear.com/days/hot-pastrami-sandwich-day...

rvnx 2y ago

or the concatenation of the lottery numbers for day A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H A bit disappointed by the article: the top upvoted answers there are literally a repetition of what ChatGPT says to do :|

0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
Alerting the course of human history by gifting baubles from the future. Lottery numbers will not be stable.

Vecr 2y ago

That's probably crackable with enough effort though. A huge effort, but it might be practical for a team of governments if they knew the person was a time traveler.

kmoser 2y ago
You could add more entropy by including not just the headline but an assortment of text from other pages, e.g. market price of whatever stock is listed on page X, the 10th sentence on page Y, etc.

adrianmonk 2y ago

If you can ignore the butterfly effect, I'd use the last digit of the closing price of 100 different stocks. Stock prices are hard to predict in the first place[1]. And the last digit will be the hardest digit to predict. --- [1] You could get very rich if you knew how. Lots of people want to be rich, yet basically nobody is doing it successfully.

9dev 2y ago
Even if you could: your actions based on that knowledge would alter the price again, such that any method you devise to predict stock prices will a) have to factor that into its calculations and b) by definition will only work for a single user.

tzs 2y ago

Depending on how time travel works that might have a huge hole. 1. You pick a hash of the headline from the January 14th 2030 of the Springfield Shopper as your key and encrypt some data. 2. You use your time machine to send the encrypted data to someone in 2024 with instructions telling them how to recover the key, expecting that they will have to wait until January 14th 2030. 3. Some rich person decides they do not want to wait. They notice that January 14th is National Hot Pastrami Sandwich Day [1]. 4. They buy the Springfield Shopper and institute a policy that every year on January 14th the headline will be "Happy National Hot Pastrami Sandwich Day!". 5. If we are in the kind of universe where time travel to the past can affect the time that the time traveler came from their actions in #4 make it so "Happy National Hot Pastrami Sandwich Day!" is the headline you used. 6. In 2024 they try to decrypt the data using a hash of "Happy National Hot Pastrami Sandwich Day!" and it works. [1] https://www.daysoftheyear.com/days/hot-pastrami-sandwich-day/ https://www.daysoftheyear.com/days/hot-pastrami-sandwich-day...