The notary

A private record, with public proof of date and origin

The notary establishes precedence. It records, publicly and with a date, that a specific document existed in my keeping at a specific moment. I use it for work produced in collaboration, or in a field where more than one person is working on the same problem. If a version of the text later appears elsewhere, the record shows which came first.

The document is fingerprinted in the browser — a SHA-256 hash of the file's contents, computed locally. It never leaves my machine. That fingerprint, together with a short description and the current date, is signed by an agent with its own Ethereum key and published as an attestation on-chain.

Because the record is on-chain, the date is fixed. It cannot be altered or back-dated, not by me and not by anyone else. Anyone holding a copy of the document can recompute its fingerprint and check it against the record. If the two match, the file is the one that was sealed on that date.

How it works

1. 1 · Fingerprint The document is hashed in the browser. It never leaves the machine.
2. 2 · Describe A short line identifies the document. This becomes the public description.
3. 3 · Seal The agent signs the fingerprint, the description, and the date.
4. 4 · Verify Anyone holding the file can check it against the record.

The notary uses the same attestation infrastructure — EAS on Celo — that I designed for the Eo1 register. It applies the pattern to a different problem: personal precedence, rather than the shared record of a commons. A fuller walkthrough of the mechanism is on the mechanism page, and there is a public verification tool for checking any file against the record.

Three states

A use case

I draft a proposal on 1 October and seal it. The fingerprint and a short description are published; the file stays with me. Six weeks later, a version of the text appears elsewhere. Because my seal predates it, I have a record that shows the earlier date. I disclose the sealed file; anyone can check that it matches the fingerprint recorded on 1 October, and that the date precedes the later appearance.

The record is public and independent. It does not rely on my word, or on the cooperation of either platform. It relies only on the file and the register.

A document sealed before it is shared is on record with an earlier date than any version that appears afterwards. That earlier date is what establishes precedence.

The record

Each sealed document appears here with the date of sealing, a short description, and its fingerprint.

• Loading the record…

What this proves, and what it doesn't

The record shows that a specific file existed at a specific moment, and has not been altered since. It does not show that I wrote it, or that the ideas in it are original. Anyone can seal a file. In practice, the earliest dated attestation is the one that matters.

The record also depends on my keeping the file. If I lose my copy, the fingerprint, description, and date survive, but the contents cannot be recovered. The register hosts nothing; it only attests.

Extending the heartbeat

The heartbeat agent already attests the fingerprint of this site daily. The same kind of agent signs the notary records. One pattern, used for two related purposes: to record what a page was, and to record what a document was.