How to check we are telling the truth

A press that claims permanence should be checkable by strangers. Every work here can be verified at four increasing depths, and you can stop at whichever one you find sufficient.

1. The bytes match the digest printed beside them

When you open a work, your browser downloads the exact bytes, hashes them, and compares the result with the digest this page publishes. It runs automatically, and the answer appears under the title of every work.

Be clear about what that is worth. It catches a truncated download, a corrupted mirror, a file that has drifted from its record. It cannot catch deliberate substitution, because the digest is served by this website too: anyone able to change the bytes could change the digest to match. It is a consistency check, not a proof of honesty. For that, keep reading. The checks below get their answer from Bitcoin instead of from us.

2. The transaction is real

Every work page shows its inscription identifier, its commit and reveal transaction identifiers, and the block it landed in, with links out to public block explorers that have nothing to do with this press. You can look the transaction up there and see it exists.

3. Bitcoin agrees, checked in your browser

The Verify against Bitcoin button on each work does the real check. Your browser fetches the raw reveal transaction from independent public sources, confirms those sources returned identical bytes, reads the Ordinals envelope out of the Taproot witness itself, following the same rules the ord software follows, including skipping the annex and taking the script immediately before the control block. It then compares the body found on chain with the bytes on your screen.

Nothing in that process is sent to this website, and the bytes it compares come from Bitcoin, not from us. One thing still rests on our word: which inscription a given page claims to be. The identifier is printed on the page so you can check it against any Ordinals index and satisfy yourself. If the comparison fails, the page will say so plainly.

4. Your own node, no browser involved

The strongest check needs nothing from us. With a Bitcoin node you can pull the reveal transaction and read the inscription out of it directly:

bitcoin-cli getrawtransaction <reveal txid>

Take the witness of the inscription input. Drop the final element if it begins with 0x50, which is the annex. The tapscript is the element immediately before the control block. Inside it, find the envelope OP_FALSE OP_IF "ord" … OP_ENDIF, skip the header fields, and concatenate every push after the single empty push that separates headers from body. The SHA-256 of that body must equal the content digest shown on the work page.

Any Ordinals index will also serve the content directly, which is a weaker check because it trusts the index:

GET /content/<inscription id>

If a check fails

Believe the chain, not the website. A mismatch means the copy you are reading is not the work that was published, and you should treat this site as compromised until it is explained.