Delivering an Earth-Shattering Discovery? 620
An anonymous reader asks: "Just for fun... suppose you've made an Earth-shattering discovery that, when revealed, will cause massive social upheaval. Maybe you've discovered a new energy source or weapon, or figured out how to factor large primes in
seconds, or learned how to time travel back in time and affect the present. Being a nice guy, you decide to warn the world now and give
everybody a few years to prepare before revealing the discovery. How can you absolutely encrypt or otherwise protect your discovery, but guarantee its revealing at a certain future date even if you and everybody you know is long gone? For example, could you bounce an electromagnetic signal describing the discovery off a celestial body several light-years away?"
Re:factor large primes? (Score:1, Informative)
Spaces bounce not an answer (Score:1, Informative)
Rivest on Time-Lock Cryptography (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Vaporware (Score:2, Informative)
All MLMs are pyramid schemes, in sheep's clothing. They can never work because they ignore the single most important business factor: suppy and demand, specifically market saturation.
In order to for a business venture to be successful, it must determine with *enough accuracy* (enough depending on competition, profit margin, etc) how much product the market will bear in a given sales cycle. Product produced (or procured) over and above this magic number is loss (i.e. you're oversaturating the market). This magic number is never infinite, because in any given market it can be guaranteed that not everyone will buy the product.
MLMs pay no heed to this, and have no control or decision making process which determines where the market saturation point is. Thus they all inherently oversaturate and fail, at least for all except the top levels of the pyramid.