EconomicsResearch

Provenance

Every dated desk artifact is hashed and anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain via OpenTimestamps. Verify when we claimed what — yourself, without trusting us.

Provenance · Bitcoin-anchored timestamps

Verify when we said it. Don’t trust us — check.

The desk’s claims are only worth something if the dates on them are real. So we hash every dated artifact — the papers, the receipts ledger, the Dispatch, the earnings watch list, the data files — into a manifest, and anchor that manifest to the Bitcoin blockchain via OpenTimestamps. Anyone can verify, cryptographically and without our cooperation, that an artifact existed in exactly its published form at the manifest’s time.

Why this exists

The desk publishes falsifiers before calls, watch lists before earnings, and corrections against its own headlines. All of that depends on one thing being true: that we wrote it when we say we wrote it. Platform timestamps require trusting the platform; our own dates require trusting us. A Bitcoin anchor requires trusting neither — the proof is in a chain nobody edits.

How to verify a manifest yourself
1 · Download a manifest and its proof file below (manifest-<date>.txt and .txt.ots).
2 · Install the open-source client: pip install opentimestamps-client
3 · Run ots verify manifest-<date>.txt.ots — it reports the Bitcoin block that anchors the manifest.
4 · Check any artifact against its line in the manifest: shasum -a 256 <file>.
If the hash matches, that exact file existed no later than the anchored time. Full stop.

Manifests

Newest first. Fresh proofs begin as calendar-server attestations and upgrade to full Bitcoin confirmations within hours; we re-upgrade proofs at every publish.

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What this proves — and what it doesn’t. An anchored manifest proves an artifact existed, in exactly its published byte-for-byte form, at a moment in time. It does not prove the artifact is correct — that burden stays on the sources and methods cited inside it, and on the receipts ledger where our record stands to be checked.
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