Plain Strata: Canonical Serialization, Why Two Honest Parties Can Look Like Liars

Plain Strata · Oct 18, 2026 · 39m

A hash, the short fingerprint a computer grinds out of a block of bytes, changes completely if one space changes, because it has only ever seen bytes and never once seen what they mean. That is harmless until a system stores the fingerprint of work done somewhere else, because from then on the exact printing of that work (the order of its fields, a space after a colon, whether one hundred is written 100 or 100.0) is part of the protocol, and two honest parties who printed the same document differently hand a checker a mismatch that looks exactly like a lie. Two millers show it cleanly: they…