Complexity systems researcher, Didier Sornette, did something similar in 2009 for [The Financial Bubble Experiment: advanced diagnostics and forecasts of bubble terminations](0):

• ...We do not make this document public. Instead, we make its digital fingerprint public. We generate three digital fingerprints for each document, with the publicly available (1) MD5 hash algorithm [1] and (2) 256 and 512 bit versions of the SHA-2 hash algorithm [2] [3]. This creates three strings of letters and numbers that are unique to this file. Any change at all in the contents of this file will result in different MD5 and SHA-2 signatures.

• We create the first version of our main document, containing the first two sections of this document, a brief description of our theory and methods, the MD5 and SHA-2 hashes of our first forecast and the date (1 May 2010) on which we will make the first original .pdf document public.

• We upload this main ‘meta’ document to http://arxiv.org. This makes public our experiment and the MD5 and SHA-2 hashes of our first forecast. In addition, it generates an independent timestamp documenting the date on which we made (or at least uploaded) our forecast. arxiv.org automatically places the date of when the document was first placed on its server as ‘v1’ (version 1). It is important for the integrity of the experiment that this date is documented by a trusted third party.

• We continue our research until we find our next confident forecast. We again put the forecast results in a .pdf document and generate the MD5 and SHA-2 hashes. We now update our master document with the date and digital fingerprint of this new forecast and upload this latest version of the master document to arxiv.org. The server will call this ‘v2’ (version 2) of the same document while keeping ‘v1’ publicly available as a way to ensure integrity of the experiment (i.e., to ensure that we do not modify the MD5 and SHA-2 hashes in the original document). Again, ‘v2’ has a timestamp created by arxiv.org.

• Notice that each new version contains the previous MD5 and SHA-2 signatures, so that in the end there will be a list of dates of publication and associated MD5 and SHA-2 signatures.

• We continue this protocol until the future date (1 May 2010) at which time we upload our final version of the master document. For this final version, we include the URL of a web site where the .pdf documents of all of our past forecasts can be downloaded and independently checked for consistent MD

0: https://arxiv.org/abs/0911.0454