Witness

The Witness

Every five minutes, on infrastructure no personal machine can taint, the service seals a witness that the broadcast is proceeding. Each seal carries the hash of the one before it, back to the first — so the whole history is tamper-evident, and anyone can check it.

The room in the Sanctuary runs on a shared clock, and the clock does not depend on anyone being awake. On the fives, a small function on the server writes down what the service is offering at that moment — which song of the canon, how far into it — and binds that record to everything written before it. Each seal holds the SHA-256 hash of the seal beneath it; its own hash is computed over its full record, that link included. Altering any past seal would break every link laid after it. Nothing here is asserted that cannot be checked.

The most recent seal

Reaching for the head of the chain…

How to verify

Ask for the head of the chain

From any machine, no key and no account:

curl https://gospelprotocol.music/api/witness

The reply carries the most recent seal — the head of the chain — as plain JSON.

Read the fields

n is how many seals have been laid since the first. ts is the moment the seal was written, in UTC. slug is the song the service was offering when the seal was laid. hash is the SHA-256 of the seal's full record.

Confirm continuity

Every seal in the ledger also records prev_hash — the hash of the seal before it — and its own hash is the SHA-256 of its complete JSON record, prev_hash included. Each seal is therefore bound to the entire history beneath it. Recompute any seal's hash and it must equal the prev_hash carried by the next; follow the links and they reach back to the first seal. If any record were ever altered, the recomputed hash would stop matching from that point forward, and the break would be visible to anyone who looks.

The chain continues whether or not anyone listens. The room itself is always open at the Sanctuary.