Public filing · signed · timestamped
Publish first. Prove it forever.
A free-expression space for scientists. File a discovery, a result, a proof — or a problem you cannot crack. Each filing carries your name, a date nobody can move, and evidence anyone can check, even if our servers disappear.
Attributed
The club's Ed25519 key signs « member no. X filed this digest at this time ». The signature verifies offline, with the club's public key.
Chained
Each filing's digest contains the previous one. Inserting, removing or backdating a filing breaks every later one — at once, and visibly.
Anchored in Bitcoin
The digest goes into the blockchain through the public OpenTimestamps calendars. It is the one link that holds against us: without it we could rewrite the whole chain and nobody would see it.
No filings yet. The first one could be yours.
How the proof is built
How the proof is built
No magic, four operations. Each is reproducible on your own machine, with free software, without asking us for anything.
1. The exact bytes are frozen
Your filing becomes one unique, immutable byte string — the canonical form: kind, language, title, abstract, body, equations, keywords, your member number, your display name, the filing time and the previous filing's digest, in that order and no other. Those bytes, and nothing else, are what gets proved. You can download them from the filing's page.
2. Its digest is computed (SHA-256)
A hash function reduces those bytes to 64 characters. Change one comma and the digest changes entirely, unpredictably; and from the digest, nobody knows how to craft another text producing the same one. The digest is the document's identity, and it reveals nothing of its content — which is what later allows proving a work's priority without having had to publish it.
3. The club signs the digest (Ed25519)
The club's private key signs the string
registre-v1|number|digest|date. Anyone verifies that signature with the public key published at/api/club/cle, without contacting us and even if our servers vanish. What it establishes: Horizon Builder attests that the member holding this number filed this digest at this time. What it does not: anything about whether the content is true.4. The digest goes into Bitcoin (OpenTimestamps)
The digest is sent to four public calendars run by independent third parties. They aggregate thousands of digests into a Merkle tree and write its root into a Bitcoin transaction. Once the block is mined, the date is the Bitcoin network's — which nobody controls, us included. It is the one link that holds against Horizon Builder: without it we could rewrite the whole chain and nobody would see it.
And for a Metamath proof: it is verified
Attach a .mm file to your filing and a program re-reads every step of the proof down to the axioms, in an isolated container with no internet access. The verdict comes in about ten seconds, before you publish — and it goes into the signed and anchored bytes, together with the digest of the theorem database it was rendered against. ⛔ That proves the formal statement: not its interest, not its novelty, not that it says the same thing as its title.
And what is the chain for?
Each filing's digest contains the previous one. Removing a filing, inserting one, or moving its date changes its digest — and therefore breaks the link of every later one, at once and visibly. That is what makes the order of filings verifiable without trusting anyone. The Bitcoin anchor gives the time; the chain gives the order.
Verify without us, in three commands
The OpenTimestamps client is free software (pip install opentimestamps-client).
Download the signed bytes and the .ots proof from the filing's page.
sha256sum signed-bytes.txt— the result must be the digest shown on the page.ots upgrade proof.otsthenots verify proof.ots -f signed-bytes.txt— the client returns the Bitcoin block and its date.
Copy the whole registry — that is the point
A registry held by a single server is not a registry, it is a promise. Everything is downloadable: the full list at /api/registre/billets, the signed bytes and .ots proof of every filing, the club's public key, the chain's head digest. Anyone can mirror it and re-verify it entirely, without our permission and without our help. If Horizon Builder disappears tomorrow, the filings remain provable.
What it is worth in law
What it is worth in law
This is not legal advice. These are the applicable texts and what they say, so you can judge for yourself — or talk to a lawyer with references in hand.
Admissible as evidence: yes
EU Regulation eIDAS No 910/2014, Article 41(1): « An electronic time stamp shall not be denied legal effect and admissibility as evidence in legal proceedings solely on the grounds that it is in an electronic form or that it does not meet the requirements of the qualified electronic time stamp. » In other words: a judge cannot dismiss this evidence merely because it comes from a blockchain.
Legal presumption: no
eIDAS, Article 41(2) reserves the presumption of accuracy of date and integrity to qualified time stamps, issued by a qualified trust service provider on the EU trusted list. THOTH is not a qualified service and does not claim to be. Its proof is admissible and technically sound, but a judge weighs it freely instead of presuming it accurate. That is the difference, and it is real.
In France: freedom of proof
Civil Code, Article 1358: except where the law provides otherwise, proof may be made by any means. Article 1366: an electronic writing has the same probative force as paper « provided that the person from whom it emanates can be duly identified and that it is established and preserved under conditions apt to guarantee its integrity ». That is exactly what the Ed25519 signature (identification) and the Bitcoin anchor (integrity and date) produce.
This is not a patent, and does not replace one
A patent is granted by an office such as the INPI or the EPO, and it is the filing date at the office that establishes priority. A filing here confers no monopoly. It establishes a certain date of possession — useful in particular for prior personal possession (French Intellectual Property Code, Article L613-7), which lets whoever held the invention before a third party's filing keep exploiting it. France's official date-filing equivalent is the INPI's e-Soleau envelope; it is a paid service, and the two approaches complement rather than exclude each other.
⚠️ Publishing here can destroy patentability
A patent requires absolute novelty. Any public disclosure before filing — including your own, including here — destroys that novelty in most countries, France and the rest of Europe included. If you intend to patent, file with the office FIRST, publish afterwards. THOTH is built for what is meant to be published: results, proofs, data, open problems, copyright, defensive publication.
Copyright
Copyright arises from creation, with no formality (French IP Code, Article L111-1). What is missing in practice is not the right but the proof of the date and of authorship. That is precisely what this registry produces, and what it is most directly useful for.
A DOI certifies nothing — it addresses
A filing can receive a DOI through Zenodo, CERN's archive: it is the number journals and citation software ask for, and it guarantees the address will not move. ⛔ It says nothing about the content: no peer review, no validation, no priority. The enforceable date comes from Bitcoin, authorship from the signature; the DOI only makes them citable. ⭐ It is reserved before signing, so it is sealed with everything else: it cannot be added or changed afterwards.
Outside Europe
Admissibility rules differ from country to country. The mechanism does not: a SHA-256 digest inside a Bitcoin block is a fact verifiable everywhere, by anyone, with free software. What varies is the weight the local judge gives it.
Chain status
97e566e7be0a7612bc52aca754bc3dedb418661ddb1ad4cfc5ba74c7404e2d5d
What the Registry does not do
- It reviews nothing, rates nothing, validates nothing scientifically. No filing is endorsed by Horizon Builder.
- It does not say a result is correct, or original. It says it existed on that date, written by that person.
- It replaces no patent filing. It establishes priority in time, not a right.
- A Bitcoin anchor takes a few hours. Between filing and anchoring the page says « pending » — never anything else.