How these records are anchored

This site's central claim is that its verdicts were written down before the outcomes were known. Every page so far asks you to take our word for that ordering: our database says the verdict came first, and our database is ours. Nothing stops anybody writing yesterday's date into today's row.

So the ordering is taken out of our hands. Each night a single fingerprint is computed over the whole evidence ledger and submitted to public timestamping calendars, which fold thousands of such fingerprints into one Bitcoin transaction. After that, the statement "these exact records existed no later than this block" is checkable by anyone, with open tools, and does not depend on trusting this site at all.

What an anchor proves, and what it does not

It proves existence and ordering. These records existed by that time, in exactly this form. Change one byte of one row and the fingerprint no longer matches.

It does not prove the records are correct. A verdict can be anchored and still be wrong. What anchoring removes is the one thing a database can never establish about itself: that it is not being rewritten after the fact. A copy of a database proves nothing about when it was made.

The anchors

Verifying one yourself

The fingerprint is a Merkle root over every row in the evidence runs, verdict and outcome tables, hashed field by field in a fixed order. Rebuild it from the open dataset at /data, then check the timestamp proof with the OpenTimestamps client:

pip install opentimestamps-client
ots verify vetmytoken-anchor-<id>.ots

The client speaks to the same public calendars and to a Bitcoin node; it never asks this site anything, which is the point.

Anchoring costs nothing and requires no wallet: the calendars aggregate many digests into a single transaction. That is why it can run every night rather than when a budget allows.