The Human Record makes some large promises. Your words will never be edited. Your number will never be given to anyone else. Nothing will be quietly deleted or rewritten later. Anyone can say those things. This page is about why you do not have to take our word for them.
Every promise The Human Record makes can be checked by a stranger, using a copy of the archive that we do not control and cannot edit. If we ever broke one of those promises, even by a single letter, even years from now, the check would fail publicly, on every copy in the world. Not because we confessed, but because the mathematics stopped agreeing.
When someone writes a testimony, the Record takes a kind of fingerprint of it. Think of an ink stain: those exact words, and no others, could have made that exact shape.
Anyone can look at the stain. Nobody can read the words back out of it, because it only works in one direction. But bring the true words back and they fit it perfectly. So the stain proves the words are unchanged without ever revealing them.
Those fingerprints are kept in a single list, and each entry is tied to the entry above it. Change one, whether a name, a comma or a date, and every entry below it stops matching. You cannot quietly correct one line in the middle. The damage shows immediately, and it shows to everyone, not only to us.
That is the obvious next question, and it is the right one. If we control the list, what stops us rebuilding the entire thing to hide something?
This: at regular moments we take a fingerprint of the whole list and place it in the Bitcoin blockchain, a public ledger spread across the world that nobody can edit, least of all us. It is the closest thing the internet has to carving a date into stone in a public square.
That fixes what the Record contained at that moment. If we rewrote history afterwards, the rewritten version would no longer match the stone. Anyone checking would see it. We cannot backdate.
The whole method is published openly: the code, the rules, and the list of fingerprints. Not a description of it; the actual thing. Anyone can take a copy and run the check themselves, on their own computer, without asking us and without us knowing.
That is the part that matters. A promise you have to trust is a promise. A promise anyone can test is something better.
We would rather say this plainly than let you discover it later.
Almost nobody will, and that is fine. The protection does not come from every reader running a check. It comes from the fact that anyone can: a journalist, a researcher, a suspicious stranger, someone in eighty years who has never heard of us. An institution that can be checked at any moment by anyone tends to behave as though it is being checked.
You are trusting mathematics and daylight, rather than our good intentions. That is the whole idea.
You will need a computer with Python on it. There is nothing to install and no account to make. The archive lives publicly at github.com/theadultproject1/the-human-record. GitHub is simply a website where code and files are published openly so anyone can copy them.
git clone https://github.com/theadultproject1/the-human-record cd the-human-record python tools/verify.py
If it prints OK, everything on this page held at the moment you ran it: nothing altered, no number reused, the founding documents unchanged, every withdrawal recorded. If it prints anything else, you have found something, and we would want to know. There is a private way to tell us, described in that repository.