Here's an idea for a rule. The text for the second paragraph is inspired
by Rule 478.
{
A Fingerprint for a document (the Plaintext) is a document that could
not have been reasonably created without knowledge of the Plaintext, and
which is, clearly and unambiguously, uniquely related to that Plaintext
in some specified way.
Where the rules define an action that a person CAN perform "by
commitment" to a particular kind of document, that person performs that
action by performing it by announcement while, in the same message, also
publishing a Fingerprint for a document of that kind.
}
I figured the second paragraph would fit well in that same rule, but the
fact that I needed a definition before, plus the power of the rule, plus
the fact that it's really old, makes be think it'd be best to create a
new rule under Obligations.
What do y'all think? Is this formulation good? Are more restrictions
needed on Fingerprints? Are there any obvious holes?
Notes:
* I don't want to demand players to define a “method” for obtaining the
Fingerprint from the Plaintext, because that would make it
inconvenient to add spurious text to the Fingerprint which contains a
hash, for example, without also specifying that in order to obtain it
one must “add the SHA512 hash of the Plaintext to the following text
at the position indicated” or something similar.
* However, I believe the “clearly and unambiguously” language restricts
one from arbitrarily declaring that a Fingerprint is related to a
Plaintext through some arbitrary ad-hoc relation, given the amount of
possible documents.
P.S. I'm laying ground for a minigame I want to propose, but this seems
useful on its own and could encourage interesting dynamics.
--
juan
