How it works
“Timestamped” is a word people use loosely. Here it means four separate attestations, each of which would have to be defeated on its own — and three of them involve somebody who is not us.
A signature over the canonical hash, made with the Witness key. It establishes that we observed exactly this, and nothing near it. Our public half is published at /.well-known/witness-key.json, so anybody can check a seal with any Ed25519 library without asking our permission or our servers.
A timestamp token from an independent time authority, backed by a public certificate chain. A third party with no stake in your work agrees on the hour. It verifies with stock openssl — the same command a court's expert would already know.
A commitment aggregated into a Bitcoin block. Once mined it is beyond anyone's reach, including ours. This one is not instant, and that is the evidence it is real: a fabricated Bitcoin anchor would appear immediately, because it would not be waiting on anybody.
Inclusion in our public append-only log, whose signed roots are published and then themselves anchored. This is the one that proves order, not just time — and order is what makes a quietly rewritten history fall apart.
A receipt three minutes old shows two anchors held, one sealing, and one still maturing. We show that honestly rather than drawing four ticks and hoping — a receipt that claims four when it has three is precisely the failure this product exists to prevent. The wait is not an embarrassment. It is the part that cannot be faked.
We are a registrar, not a law firm. What we can prove is what existed, and when, and in what order. The whole of what we will and won't claim is written down.