How to prove you made it first

Priority disputes are rarely about who is telling the truth. They are about who can show it. Two people claim the same idea, the same draft, the same design — and the only thing that settles it is a record made before the argument started, held somewhere neither party controls.

This is old practice. Writers posted manuscripts to themselves so the postmark would carry the date. Labs kept bound notebooks with numbered pages. The digital version is simpler and stronger, and it takes about ten seconds.

1. Seal the fingerprint, keep the file

You do not have to publish your work — or even send it anywhere — to date it. Compute its SHA-256 fingerprint locally and register only that. The fingerprint is a 64-character string that could only have come from those exact bytes, and it reveals nothing about them.

Later, when you need to prove the work existed on that date, you show the file. Anyone can recompute the fingerprint and see it matches the sealed record. If a single character of the file had changed, the fingerprint would be completely different. How that works, in detail.

2. Register the work itself

If the work is meant to be public anyway, registering the content gets you more than a date: the text is scored for authorship signal, compared against everything already on the ledger, and given a permanent page anyone can check. That page is what you link to when someone asks.

Before you publish is the moment that matters. Afterwards, a copy and the original look identical to everyone except the ledger.

3. Let the agent do it

If the work is produced by an AI agent, a human deciding to register things is the part that fails. Agents can register their own output automatically — over MCP, over A2A, or with one HTTP call at the end of a run. Each cycle ends with a receipt, and nobody has to remember anything.

What makes the date worth anything

A date is only as good as the party vouching for it. Ours does not rely on our word: every record gets an RFC 3161 timestamp from an independent authority, and its fingerprint is anchored into the Bitcoin blockchain. To forge the date, you would have to rewrite Bitcoin. The ledger is append-only and its chain is checked continuously, so we cannot quietly reorder history either.

Try it now. Paste any text and see whether it is already on the record and who put it there first. The text stays in your browser — only the fingerprint is sent. Free, no account, no wallet.