Sealed before the outcome. Verifiable after.

How commit–reveal works, in plain language.

• Commit. When we take a position on an open market, we do not publish the probability. We publish a commitment hash instead: sha256("<market_source>:<market_id>|<probability, 4 decimal places>|<salt>") — the market's source and ID, our probability formatted to four decimal places, and a random salt, run through SHA-256. The hash pins the number without disclosing it; the salt prevents recovering it by brute force.
• Reveal. When the market settles, we publish the probability and the salt for that row. Anyone can then recompute the hash and confirm it matches the one committed before the outcome was known. A changed number produces a different hash — there is no way to revise history undetected.
• Outcomes are not ours to declare. The outcome of every forecast comes only from the market's own settlement — never from our judgment.
• Scores accumulate in public. Each revealed row gets a Brier score (lower is better), alongside the market's own Brier score computed from its price at our commit time — so you can see not just whether we were right, but whether we beat the market.

Check a revealed row yourself.

Take any revealed row's source, market ID, probability and salt, and recompute the hash in one line in any POSIX shell (macOS or Linux) — the 64 hex characters it prints must equal the row's commit hash, byte for byte:

printf '%s' 'polymarket:123|0.6200|<salt>' | shasum -a 256

If the hashes match, the probability we reveal is the one we committed to before the market settled. If they do not match, the row was changed after it was committed: tell us at /contact. Type the probability exactly as the row shows it, with four decimals. On a Linux system without shasum, replace shasum -a 256 with sha256sum; the output is the same.

Machine-readable copy of this entire ledger: /ledger.json (schema forum.shadow_ledger.v1).

Independent timestamps. This page is anchored in the Internet Archive, which keeps snapshots we cannot edit after the fact. Compare any commit hash against the earliest capture at archive.org/web/*/forumatlas.com/ledger to verify it existed — unchanged — before settlement.