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Decentralized Trusted Content Protocol

Article metadata fields


For articles, the type field is fixed to "article".


The main language used in this article. Language name representation follows the definition in RFC4646. For example "zh-CN", "en-US".


Title of the article.


A short description of the subject of the article.


A comma separated list of words describing the categories. For example, "news,economy".

This field should be provided by the author when creating the article for accuracy. However categorization algorithms could be used for assistance or in the absence of author's decision.


The time when this article is created.

This field is a UNIX timestamp representing time in milliseconds starts from Jan 1, 1970 in UTC.

This field can be provided as a proof of article creation time, or Trusted Timestamp, due to the inalterability provided by Blockchain.


Author's name.


The author's unique id.

Author's identity is represented by a pair of public and private keys. For security reasons only the hash of the public key is published on Blockchain to verify the author's identity.

The algorithm used to create the key pair is RSA. Key length should be longer than 2048 bit.

The creator_id is an SHA1 hash of the public key generated. The hash should be encoded in Base36 format.


Fingerprint represented by the hash of the content.

The content_hash is an SHA1 hash of the public key generated. The hash should be encoded in hex digits.


Signature is calculated by representing all the DTCP data in a JSON string, except the signature field itself, calculate the SHA1 hash of the JSON string, and then sign the hash with private key.

The fields in the JSON array must be sorted alphabetically before signing.

Signature algorithm used is RSA.


Similarity score is a locality sensitive hash calculated using MinHash algorithm. It is used to get the estimated similarity between two articles quickly. With the similarity index built from scores of a large set of articles, we can identify similar articles in the set to a given article in a very short time.

MinHash algorithm utilizes an array of hash functions (or permutation functions). In DTCP we choose 126 hash functions, and hashing them into 9 components, which makes our similarity score a 9 dimensional vector.

The selection of permutation functions are not fixed, however, for best performance it is better selected according to some rules like Universal Hashing.

There's another fixed hash function to produce the hash component. The packing algorithm, together with the parameters used, are given in the following python codes:

    # digests are 126 numbers from the MinHash algorithm
    b = 9
    r = 14

    hashes = []

    large_prime = int(18446744073709551557)

    for i in range(0, b):

        hs = int(0)

        for j in range(0, r):
            current = int(digests[i * r + j])
            hs += current * int(7 ** j)
            hs %= large_prime


    return hashes
    # we got 9 hash components here in the hashes list
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