How it works
You should not need this page.
Strata records as you write. None of what follows is a step you take, a setting you manage, or a thing you have to remember to do — it runs whether or not anybody ever reads about it, and for most people it will sit there for years doing nothing visible at all. It is closer to insurance than to a feature, and the point of insurance is that you do not think about it.
This page exists for the day it stops being invisible: when someone questions your work and you want to know exactly what you can say, and what you cannot. Three ideas, no mathematics, about five minutes. If that day never comes, you have lost nothing by never reading it.
Strata never sends your writing anywhere. What it works with is a fingerprint — a short code worked out from your words. The rest of this page is what a fingerprint is, why linking them in order matters, and what a timestamp does and does not establish.
A fingerprint of your text
Feed any amount of text through a fixed procedure and you get a code of exactly 64 characters. The same text always gives the same code. Different text — even by one letter, even by one space — gives a completely different one.
Try it. Type anything below. The code is worked out in your browser, on your machine, and nothing is sent anywhere — which is also exactly how Strata does it.
Fingerprint
…
Change a single character and watch the whole thing change.
Two things follow, and they are the whole reason this works.
You cannot go backwards. There is no procedure that turns
6b1f…a90c back into a sentence. Someone holding the code
learns nothing about your writing — not the words, not the subject,
not the length in any useful sense. This is why a fingerprint can be made
public when the manuscript absolutely cannot.
You cannot fake a match. To produce a different text with the same 64 characters is not merely hard; nobody has ever done it for the procedure we use, and the number of possible codes is larger than the count of atoms making up the Earth. So if two fingerprints agree, the two texts are the same text.
One root for the whole work
A book is not one lump of text. It is chapters, and notes, and the pictures inside them. Each piece gets its own fingerprint. Those fingerprints are then combined in pairs, and the pairs combined again, and again, until a single 64-character code is left at the top. That code is called the root.
Two things follow. The first is the one people expect; the second is the one that is actually useful.
Change anything, anywhere, and the root changes. Move a comma in chapter nine and chapter nine’s fingerprint changes, so the pair it belongs to changes, so the pair above that changes, and so on to the top. There is no edit small enough to slip through, and no way to change the root without changing something underneath it.
You can prove one piece without revealing the others. Suppose an editor has the root you published in March, and you want to show that chapter three is genuinely part of that manuscript. You hand over chapter three and two other fingerprints — the one beside it and the one covering the other half of the book. They combine those upwards, arrive at a root, and compare it with the one they already had.
If it matches, chapter three was in the manuscript you stamped, exactly as it now reads. And they have learned nothing whatsoever about chapters one, two and four: not the words, not the titles, not the length. A thousand-chapter work needs about ten fingerprints for this, not a thousand, which is why the same trick works on records far larger than a book.
That is the property worth having. It is the difference between answering a question about one chapter and publishing a manuscript you have not published.
The order, and what fixing it is worth
Roots are also linked: each entry records the root of the entry before it, so the sequence they were made in is fixed inside the record itself. That is worth stating plainly, and so is its limit.
On its own, that limit is real. Someone who controls their own machine and their own record can rebuild the whole thing — recompute every root in order and produce a chain that looks perfect. It is a short script, not a feat. A chain proves the order of entries within a record; by itself it does not prove the record was not invented this morning.
What cannot be rebuilt is a root that has already left your hands. You cannot unpublish a number, and you cannot reach the copy your agent has had since March. That is why the third idea exists, and why the first two are not much use without it.
All of this applies to us exactly as it applies to you — we could not doctor your history without the damage being obvious to you, or to anyone you had already handed a copy to.
The tree, the leaf encoding and the inclusion proofs are implemented and checked against the DAON wire format’s own executable test vectors. What is not built is the editor cutting a manuscript into separately provable pieces: today a manuscript is committed whole, so the disclosure described above is a property of the format rather than a button you can press this week. It is listed on what exists today, where it will keep saying so until it is done.
Proving when, to someone who does not trust you
A chain fixes the order of your drafts, but it does not prove when any of them existed. Your computer's clock can be set to any date at all, so it is not evidence — and Strata says so wherever it shows one.
For a date that holds up, the fingerprint gets published somewhere public, permanent and outside anyone's control. After that, anybody can see that this exact code existed by that moment. And since only that exact text produces that exact code, the text existed by then too.
We use it because it is a clock that no company owns, no government runs, and nobody can quietly rewind. That is the entire appeal, and we would happily use something else with the same property.
You do not need a wallet. You never buy, sell, hold or spend anything. It costs you nothing. Fingerprints from all over the world are gathered up and recorded together, so the cost per person rounds to zero — and Strata pays none of it either.
Your writing is not on a blockchain. A 64-character code is, and it cannot be turned back into words. Anyone reading that record sees an anonymous number and a date.
Using a public clock is not an endorsement of a currency. We do not accept cryptocurrency, we are not paid in it, and we have no plans to be.
This is done through OpenTimestamps, a free and open service that has been doing exactly this since 2016. It is not ours, which is the point: if Strata disappeared tomorrow, your timestamps would still check out.
So what does this actually prove?
Put together: this exact text existed no later than this date, and it was built up across versions in an order that cannot be rearranged afterwards.
That is a real thing to be able to show a doubtful editor, an integrity officer, or a court. It is also less than people often assume, and the difference matters:
The second one is the gap we are closing. When the signing key lands, each entry will also carry a signature, and the claim becomes this text, by this key, by this date. Until that day this page will keep saying it is missing, because a site that quietly upgrades its own claims is not one you should trust with a record.
How someone else checks it
You can hand a folder to anyone. It holds the text, the timestamp proof, and a page of instructions. Checking it needs two programs, neither of which is ours — one of them already comes with their computer. Strata is nowhere in the process, and neither are we.