Trust & transparency
Priority defense
Independent researchers get scooped, ignored, or told to come back with an affiliation. This page is why the permanent record exists: so a claim can be dated without handing the idea to a gatekeeper first.
What a timestamp is
A prediction on TOE-Share has a claim, a falsification condition, and a locked_at time. Once locked, the database refuses edits to that row. You can keep the text private, mark it timestamped without revealing the wording, or publish it. Visibility only moves one way: private → timestamped → public.
That is priority protection, not a lock-in trick. The platform cannot rewrite the date later to make a later idea look earlier.
The review record is the other half
A locked prediction without a stored review is just a note. The public review profile records what was evaluated, when, and at what score. If you later revise the paper, the new review is a new version. The old one stays, so nobody can pretend the first attempt was the polished one.
Why this matters for independent work
Traditional venues often require an institutional email or an arXiv endorser before the work is even dated in public. Independent authors then face a bind: stay quiet and risk being second, or post on a blog with no review trail.
Blake L. Shatto's rho-index paper is the live acceptance case for domain-aware review: the work is treated as pure mathematics and scored on verifiability, not on whether it makes an empirical physics bet. The point of the record is not the score. The point is that the claim and the evaluation are dated on a URL that Google and other researchers can cite.
What we will not do
We will not silently delete a published timestamp so a later author can look first. We will not let a retraction erase the fact of publication. Withdrawal is described here: the work can leave standing, the date cannot be rewritten.