§6.4 · Permanence and anchoring
The daily digest
The Register is append-only. Each day we publish a Merkle root over every file it holds, so that anything on it can be shown to have existed on a given date.
How it is built
Each leaf is the SHA-256 of a published file, over its bytes exactly as published. Leaves are taken in a fixed order — by kind, then by identifier — and combined pairwise with SHA-256 over the raw digests, left then right; an odd node is paired with itself. The root of a Register holding nothing is sixty-four zeros, and is published as such.
The root is published in at least one public location we do not operate. We may use a third-party anchoring service, and the Register must not depend on any one of them to function. If every such service stopped tomorrow, the files, the leaf hashes and the arithmetic would all still be here.
Verify it yourself
This is the part that matters. You do not have to believe us, and you do not need our software. Fetch the export, hash the files, recompute the root, compare it to what we published. Our agreement is not required at any step.
curl -O https://rootandbranchregister.org/register/tools/mirror.py python3 mirror.py https://rootandbranchregister.org ./rbr-mirror python3 ./rbr-mirror/verify.py ./rbr-mirror/export ./rbr-mirror/latest.txt
mirror.py fetches a complete copy and the day’s digest; verify.py recomputes the root from the files alone and exits non-zero if a single byte disagrees. Both are standard-library Python, both import nothing and neither needs an account, a key or any agreement with us. Read them before you run them.
Published roots
A published root is never changed. When the Register’s contents change a new digest is published beside the old one, so every root that was ever published stays true of the files it covered. The newest is always at /digest/latest.txt.
2026-09-23T1518Z2026-09-23T1517Z2026-09-23
Each file lists the root, the tree rule and every leaf hash in tree order, so any past day can be recomputed from the files of that day.