Fingerprints

We do not publish our valuations. A published figure would tell everyone exactly what to offer, and would make it impossible to ever take a swap that looks sideways on paper.

So we publish this instead. A fingerprint is a short code worked out from the exact text of a valuation. Change one character of that text and the code changes completely, and the code itself reveals nothing — you cannot work backwards from it to the valuation.

Its purpose is narrow and worth stating exactly. If we ever publish a valuation, in whole or in part, anyone can work out its fingerprint and check it against the line below. If they match, that is the text we recorded at the time, unchanged. If we had quietly improved a valuation afterwards to make a decision look better, they would not match.

What this does not prove

That a fingerprint was recorded when we say it was. The timestamp is written by us, on our own systems. Every line also arrives in a dated commit to the project’s code repository, which is harder to revise after the fact than a row in a database we control — but that is not the same as a trusted third party, and we are not going to claim it is. A proper timestamping service would close that gap. We have not built one.

How to check one

The checking tool is deliberately self-contained — no accounts, no keys, nothing of ours to trust. It is record/verify-fingerprint.mjs in the project repository, and it needs nothing but the file you are checking.