⏱ The Chain Is the Clock
In the real experiment behind the paper, one machine's clock was 17.6 seconds wrong — and the shared story stayed in perfect order. Here's why.
Analogy: a relay race. You know who ran third because they took
the baton from the second runner — not because you trusted everyone's wristwatch. Each new
entry physically holds a fingerprint of the one before it. The hand-off is the order.
💻 The Mac
clock: —
🎮 The Steam Deck
clock: — (wrong!)
The shared story
What am I looking at? Every entry (“frame”) carries a real SHA-256
fingerprint of the entry before it — computed live in your browser. Chain order can't
lie: each frame provably came after the one it fingerprints. Wall-clock order breaks
the moment one clock is wrong — flip the sort and watch the Deck's entries jump to the
wrong place. That's the paper's §3.8: the timestamp is a note in the margin; the chain is
the clock.