We were told a (kind of) similar story in high school: https://medium.com/intuition/explain-this-or-i-will-shoot-yo...

Martin Odersky (lead designer of Scala) also pursued this approach some years ago, not sure if any of this actually went into Scala3. He mentioned this in many talks before, such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxyyJyB_Ssc (JVMLS 2015 - Compilers are Databases)

Coincidentally I'm also reading about Lamport signature (https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/04/07/hash-bas...).

It's really interesting because it only uses hash function and doesn't rely on trapdoor function! I think quite many people (me included) only learn about digital signature after public key cryptography, so it's quite a surprise to know about Lamport signature. Also, IIUC, because it doesn't rely on trapdoor function it also resistant against quantum computer in the future