Overview

In Truestamp, a beacon is a public, verifiable snapshot of the Truestamp chain: the block hash of a finalized or committed block, published on the public /beacons page as a source of verifiable randomness and as a moment-in-time marker. Every beacon exposes exactly four fields, id, hash, timestamp, and previous_hash (the chain-link to the previous beacon), and each hash has a stable permalink at /beacons/<hash>. Because the hash commits, through a Merkle tree, to everything finalized in the underlying block, it is unpredictable before finalization and immutable afterward, which is what qualifies it as a public randomness beacon. The beacon page also derives deterministic fairness tools from the beacon hash (coin toss, dice roll, random integer, lottery draw, and drawing from a list), each using its own domain-separation byte prefix so outcomes derived from the same beacon are independent. See public entropy beacons for the page behavior and proof downloads, and public randomness for the security properties, which rest on the entropy sources folded into each block.