Whitepaper - Factom With Cover

Entries: How Entries are Created
Entries are constructed by users and submitted to Factom. By hashing or encoding information,
the user can ensure the privacy of Entries. The Entries can instead be plain text if encoding or
obscuring the data isn’t necessary. By recording a hash of a document, Factom can provide
basic proof of publication. Presenting the document at a later time allows one to create its hash,
and compare it to the hash recorded in the past.
There is lots of flexibility in the data that is accepted. It can be something short like a hyperlink.
It could also be larger, but not too large, since fees limit the size of the data accepted. This is
similar to Bitcoin. Large 100 kB+ Bitcoin transactions are possible, but would need to pay a
proportionately greater transaction fee. This size, while gigantic in Bitcoin, would be moderately
sized for Factom. Since every Bitcoin full node needs the entire blockchain to fully validate, it
needs to stay small. In Factom, only the highest level Directory Blocks are required to fully
validate a Chain. If someone is not specifically interested in a Chain's data, they would not
download it.
Take a simple example of an uneditable Twitter-like system. A celebrity would craft an Entry as a
piece of text. They would then sign it with a private key to show it came from them. Followers of
the celebrity would find which Chain they publish in and would monitor it for updates. Any new
signed Entries would be recognized by follower's Application software as a tweet. Others could
tweet at the celebrity by adding Entries to the celebrity’s Chain.
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