Standards · Verifiable publishing

Catalog Provenance: Our Editions, Anchored to Bitcoin

Short answer: every current edition of every Vita Indarra book is fingerprinted (SHA-256) and the fingerprint list is timestamped on the Bitcoin blockchain via OpenTimestamps. That makes our shipping record checkable by anyone, forever, without trusting us: what we published, exactly, and when. As far as we know, no other publisher does this. We think every honest one should.

Why a publisher would do this

Our whole catalog argues one thing: trust must be verifiable, or it's just branding. It would be strange to print that in ten books and then ask you to take our own publishing record on faith. So we apply our own standard to ourselves. Each time our editions change, we publish a manifest of their exact fingerprints and anchor it into Bitcoin — a public ledger that nobody, including us, can quietly rewrite. If we ever silently altered a book and pretended we hadn't, the record would expose us. That's the point: we've made our own dishonesty a detectable event.

What this proves — and what it doesn't

An anchored manifest proves existence and integrity: these exact files existed on the manifest date and haven't been altered since. It does not, by itself, prove the claims inside a book are true — how we handle truth (real numbers, labeled estimates, printed limits) lives on our standards page. Provenance makes the record honest; the editorial law makes the content honest. You need both, and we say so out loud.

The current manifest

• Manifest (all 10 editions, SHA-256): provenance-manifest-2026-07-04.txt
• Bitcoin timestamp proof: provenance-manifest-2026-07-04.txt.ots (standard OpenTimestamps format; submitted to four public calendars on July 4, 2026 — pending proofs become Bitcoin-final within hours of a calendar commitment)

Verify it yourself (two minutes)

• 1. Download both files above.
• 2. Go to opentimestamps.org and drop them in — the site reads the proof and reports the attestation, including the Bitcoin block once the proof is final. (Command-line users: ots verify provenance-manifest-2026-07-04.txt.ots.)
• 3. To check a book file: compute its SHA-256 (certutil -hashfile book.epub SHA256 on Windows, shasum -a 256 on Mac) and compare against the manifest line.

When editions change — books here are living documents, silently corrected and improved — a new manifest is anchored and published here. Old manifests stay up. The history is the product.

Questions about this page belong with our editorial standards. The books behind it are on Amazon.