The dated record — a method held on a date, without disclosing it.

Sealed, dated and closed — three mechanisms, put to one use.

An address, a seal and a history. A dated record is a way of using three mechanisms at once. An edition is one frozen version of a Card, sealed when it is frozen, and its seal can be checked at tacittessera.com/verify. A number's history is append-only and dated line by line (Trust), and an entry may be carried closed, its existence undisclosed (the Registry). A holder who registers closed, seals an edition and leaves the history to run has, from that day, something a named party can check without being shown the method.

The gap it closes. No instrument surveyed hands the holder of a record any positive entitlement in it, and that is the ground Protect stands on. A way of working a holder will not publish has had no dated record of its own that anybody else could check: the holder's own files are dated by the holder, and a counterparty is asked to take that on trust. Together the three close that gap without the register learning anything it would otherwise not hold.

Why all three, and not one. Each alone is too thin to point at. A seal says that a thing has not been altered, not when it came to exist. A dated history says that something happened on a day, not what form the thing was in. A closed entry keeps the material back and leaves a holder with nothing to point at. Taken together they carry the form, the date and the discretion at once.

What it is not a substitute for. It is not an instrument, and it does not put the holder in a position the law has not put them in. Its weight is the weight such a record ordinarily has, which is a question for counsel and not one this page answers.

What stands on the record, and what never reaches it.

Read as a list, six ordinary facts about an ordinary entry. Read as a whole, they answer a question a holder has had no way to answer: what can be said, later and to somebody else, about a method that was never published. The answer is exact, and it is small.

What the holder shows, and what the register answers.

What the holder shows. The holder shows the sealed Card and its seal to whoever they choose, naming the number and the edition with it, and decides when, to whom, and whether at all.

What the register answers, and to whom. Where an entry is carried closed, the register answers the holder, and any party the holder names, about that edition and no other: whether this sealed edition stood at this date, and whether what has been shown matches it. It answers nobody else. The public address answers only what carriage has published, so a closed entry's number is answered there as not in the register — closed carriage doing what it was asked to do, not a check that failed (the Registry).

What a named party gets, and what it does not. One narrow fact, read against the register's own record and not against anything the holder hands over, with the date the edition was sealed beside it. Not the material: the check reads the seal, worked out from the sealed Card, so what comes back is a statement about a record and never about the work it describes. A party who wants the method wants a licence, which is a separate instrument — and what a check answers, and why the set of answers does not grow, is on Verify.

Opening it, later and on the holder's decision. Carriage is not fixed at registration: a holder may move an entry from closed to restricted, or to published, and the move is its own event with its own date while the earlier arrangement stays readable. A record kept back and later put on the index reads afterwards as exactly that — a dated sequence rather than an entry that appeared fully formed.

What is not settled. What a check can be made to answer for somebody who has not been given the number is written down and not answered.

Who this reaches. For counsel, it is a record of what was asserted and when, produced by a third party, whose weight in a dispute is counsel's question and not the register's. For the holder it is a date and a seal to point at, with nothing disclosed by the pointing; for a party the holder names, one narrow fact and no opinion.

Evidence that a sealed record existed on a date, and nothing beyond it.

This register records what was asserted, who asserted it, on what date, and what evidence was produced with it. It records that it has not tested the assertion. It does not decide who owns anything.

That sentence is the ceiling on everything above. A dated record is evidence about a record: that one existed, in a stated form, on a stated date, sealed by a party with no interest in the matter. It is not a finding that the holder originated anything, holds any right in it, or that the method is a secret in law. Each of those is a question about the world, and the register has no facts to answer it with.

What remains is worth having because it is narrow: a holder who has published nothing can still point at a number, an edition and a date; a party the holder names can check all three without being shown the method; and neither relies on the other's word about when the record was made.