Provenance
The creative work — the art, the music, the written canon — is hashed into a single manifest and anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain. Not as a product. As a timestamp.
The problem it solves
A repository can prove what it contains — git hashes everything. It cannot prove when: commit dates are written by whoever makes the commit, and the whole history could be rebuilt by whoever holds the repository. For a body of creative work, those two gaps are the entire question of priority. I made this, and I made it first is otherwise a claim resting on the author's word.
So the work is anchored. A small tool hashes every file of the creative work with SHA-256 into one deterministic manifest — the same files produce a byte-identical manifest on any machine. That one file is then stamped with OpenTimestamps, which folds it into a Merkle tree with thousands of other submissions and commits the root to the Bitcoin blockchain. One proof covers every file.
No cryptocurrency is involved. No wallet, no token, no purchase, no transaction fee. The OpenTimestamps calendars pay the Bitcoin fees themselves; the service is free. This project issues no token — the anchor is a timestamp, not an asset.
What the proof says — and what it does not
It says: these exact bytes existed no later than the time of a specific Bitcoin block. That is checkable by anyone, forever, without trusting the author, this website, GitHub, or any company — including OpenTimestamps itself, whose job ends once the hash is in a block.
It does not say who made the work, or that the work is original — a timestamp proves existence, not authorship. The project says so itself, in the same document that describes the scheme. Marking the line between what is proven and what is claimed is the house rule here.
When the work changes, the manifest is regenerated and the superseded proof is archived beside the exact manifest it attests — a dated pair for every state the work has been in. Each remains a true statement about the date it was made.
Verify it yourself
The manifest and its proof live in the public repository. With the free opentimestamps-client:
git clone https://github.com/CrystalArchitect/TerAustralis-Incognita.git
cd TerAustralis-Incognita
# every file matches the manifest
python3 mythos/tools/provenance.py --check
# the manifest is anchored to Bitcoin
pip install opentimestamps-client
ots verify mythos/MANIFEST.sha256.otsots verify checks a Bitcoin block header — via a local node if you run one, or a
public block explorer if you don't. Nobody's permission is required, which is the point.