Interpol Red Notice for Cobie
Get SHA256'd Nerd
Ah the joy of predicting events in the future.
Predicting things is fun. One way to prove that you know about a certain event is by tweeting a SHA256 hash which was a message encoded.
It’s especially useful for people with lots of influence to make predictions without scaring people or the market.
I have done this in the past for various predictions. For example I posted this hash days before the collapse of FTX.
Here’s how it works. For example, Let’s say I am Elon Musk and want to make a prediction about the SEC charging me for Dogecoin related tweets that moved the crypto markets. Let’s say his prediction was “The SEC is planning to sue me for $100m related to Dogecoin tweets in the next month”. If he had just tweeted that, that would cause chaos in the crypto markets and potentially incriminate him more.
So he can just convert that prediction into a hash using SHA256 and then just tweet “7ed052a07229f4ebddbfd167beff8e3fbef64b82e71a42baad6b5f67c4d4d8b1” to his followers. Later once the news is official, he can reveal that he already knew what was about to happen by revealing the phrase “The SEC is planning to sue me for $100m related to Dogecoin tweets in the next month”. Anyone can copy and paste this phrase and get the same hash.
Since it’s a one way hash its mathematically impossible to guess the phrase. There are ways to break the hash using a brute force method (i.e. a computer running through all possible combinations of words) but that will take basically an infinite amount of time if the message is long enough. So it’s basically impossible to figure out the message unless the person reveals it.
Cobie, a really popular crypto twitter ‘influencer’ with 700k followers, has posted a bunch of these hashes over the years to make predictions about events.
As someone with the power to move the crypto markets with his tweets, his decided to be careful and just tweet out a hash of his prediction. But then people started to figure out the message.
Turns out the prediction based on a rumor he heard was that the Interpol had issued a red notice for CZ, CEO and founder of Binance.
As you can probably guess, the markets didn’t like this information and Bitcoin fell nearly $1000 or around 3% based on this hash being ‘cracked’.
Crypto news outlets started reporting the story as facts using cobie’s hash as evidence and it caused people to panic. Later CZ kept posting 4 (his new mantra to fight against bad news that comes out about him or his company) and refuting rumors. Then Cobie said that he made the guess based on rumors he heard.
Well how did people ‘crack’ the code?
Turns out Cobie had discussed this rumor with a bunch of his friends before and one of them managed to find out the hash based on their discussions and revealed the hash. Then it led to this turmoil.
The question now is whether this is morally or even legally a wrong thing to do. Obviously people who were highly levered got liquidated and started crying on Twitter asking for Rishi Sunak to personally issue an arrest warrant and interpol red notice for Jordan Fish. I have no idea how these baboons still have money after a year and a half of bear. Upcoming McDonalds layoffs should reduce this behaviour.
Others were questioning whether this supposed “friend” who leaked the hash was just cobie who used this as an opportunity to profit off the dump by shorting.
My thoughts? Just salt the hash. Aka after your prediction add a bunch of random characters. E.g. (“Interpol Red Notice for CZ. yomommasofatshefilleduptheentiremempool”)
This makes it impossible even for people you have discussed the matter with to guess.
Also is this illegal? Probably not. As long as he didn’t intentionally leak the hash through an alt account and profit by shorting.