Proofread is a place to read and publish documents. Reading is free, and you can open a document without an account. When a document is published, we record a fingerprint of its exact text on Bitcoin, so any later change to it can be caught.
Digital text is easy to alter, and usually nobody can tell after the fact. The point of this is to make the original, and any change to it, something you can check for yourself. Here is how that works, and what it does and doesn’t tell you.
The Bitcoin timestamp
When an author publishes a document, we take its exact text and run it through SHA-256. That gives a short fingerprint of the whole document, and changing even one character gives a different one. We write that fingerprint to the Bitcoin blockchain using OpenTimestamps, which ties it to a Bitcoin block and the time that block was made.
If the published text is edited later, running SHA-256 again produces a fingerprint that no longer matches the one on Bitcoin. That mismatch is how a change shows up.
What it proves, and what it doesn’t
The timestamp shows that the text existed in this exact form at that time, and that it hasn’t changed since. That is the whole claim. It doesn’t tell you who wrote the document, and it says nothing about whether the content is true. Whether the document is any good is for you to decide.
It is tamper-evident, not tamper-proof. It doesn’t make the text impossible to change. Someone can still edit their own copy. What they can’t do is alter the published version without the fingerprint giving them away.
The reading companion
Every document comes with an AI you can ask questions. It answers from the document’s own text and shows you the lines it drew from, so you can turn to the page and check for yourself. It doesn’t reach out to the open internet, so its answers stay tied to what is actually in the document. If the document doesn’t address something, it should say so rather than fill the gap from elsewhere.
Discuss a document
Read public documents without an account. If the author has enabled discussion, sign in to leave a public comment or reply to other readers at the end of a chapter.
When an author accepts private notes, you can send them a question while reading. Sign in to send a note and find replies in the document’s Notes tab. Some authors require a verified account.
Publish a document
To publish your own work, sign in and upload a PDF or EPUB. Review the prepared text, publish when ready, and share a link that opens your document directly.
Check a document yourself
You don’t have to trust us on any of this. Each document’s verification page shows its fingerprint and the Bitcoin block it is tied to, so you can recompute the fingerprint from the text and compare the two. On top of that, an independent watchdog re-checks every published document on its own schedule and keeps a running log of every check. If a fingerprint ever stopped matching, it would say so.
Browse the documents to start reading.