expand_less Contraction of Authorization or Authored Chains. This is an abstract distributed data structure to represent and store a sequence or sequences of digital messages such that:

A chain is permanently connected to a single public identifyer. The public identifyers are connected to asymetric key pairs such that the private key is secured and available to the owner of the identity for signing (authenticating) new messages to be added to the chain, or decrypting private messages. WhenA a creation inimessage is authenticated to the identity by generating a signature of the creation message using the private key.
All messages are stored in the distributed database indexed by its signature. The identity's public key can be used at any time to validate the authenticity of the message id (storage index) with respect to the message contents.
A new message can always be added to a given point in an existing chain. Each new message is chained to the message before by its message id by including it in the new message and then generating the signature for the new message (using the identity's private key to validate the message is authentic). In this way, any message id can be used to authenticate the entire message chain withfrom cryptographicthe signatures.new Thatmessage is back to the creation message.
The history of every message is a unique chain back to the header, but it is also valid to add new messages again and again to the same point, even to the creation message, of a given chain. Therefore, a nessage id does not uniquely specify the next message, or even whether any next message exists. Applications