orphograph

About Orphograph

Orphograph is a small office for photographers, illustrators, and writers who require a permanent and low-cost record that a file existed before a given date — before a training run, before a dispute, before a content claim.

Why this exists

The arrival of generative models has changed what "I made this" can mean. A portfolio that lives online has almost certainly been read by something other than its intended audience. When the question later becomes which file existed first, the practical answer is whichever party can produce the earliest verifiable timestamp.

Court-grade chain-of-custody is expensive, and excessive for most working artists. A Bitcoin-anchored cryptographic timestamp covers the great majority of ordinary cases, and the underlying protocol (OpenTimestamps) has been in continuous operation since 2016. The remaining problem was one of convenience: dropping a file into a browser and walking away with a receipt that remains verifiable decades hence.

That is the entire instrument.

Who runs the office

Orphograph is operated by a single founder. A one-person office means accountability is unambiguous — every decision visible on the site (the open-source verifier, the receipts that outlive the office, the analytics that record no behavioural profile) is a single deliberate choice rather than a committee compromise.

A one-person office is also honest about scale. The office is not a continuous enterprise support desk. Correspondence is read and answered within a few days, not within minutes. The software is durable; the human who maintains it keeps an ordinary schedule.

The trust contract

Timestamping services have, historically, not outlived their operators. Their receipts ceased to verify when the issuing office closed or pivoted. The office will not make that trade. Concretely:

  1. The receipt format is open. Standard OpenTimestamps .ots files together with a small JSON manifest. No proprietary fields, no encrypted blob, no "premium verification" tier.
  2. The verifier is MIT-licensed. Approximately one hundred lines of Python, standard-library only, published at orphograph.com/verify/. A local copy on a backup drive is sufficient. Should the office close, every receipt issued by it remains verifiable.
  3. Files do not leave the user's machine. The SHA-256 and SHA-512 fingerprints are computed in the browser via the WebCrypto API. Only those fingerprints are submitted. The behaviour is observable: a network inspector will confirm that no file bytes are transmitted.
  4. Bitcoin is the durable layer, not the office. Receipts are anchored to public Bitcoin transactions through the OpenTimestamps calendar network — five independent calendars per anchor. An upgraded .ots file contains the full Merkle path to a Bitcoin block, so the calendars are not required for later verification.

What the office does not do

  • No claim of legal admissibility. A timestamp records that a fingerprint existed at a given moment. Whether that record is treated as evidence in a particular matter is a question of jurisdiction, judge, and procedure, and is for counsel to determine. The office issues a date-of-existence attestation, not a legal opinion.
  • No file hosting. If the original file is lost, the receipt by itself attests to nothing recoverable; there is nothing left to compare against. Files should be backed up by the ordinary means.
  • No watermarking, fingerprinting, or behavioural tracking. The site loads no third-party analytics scripts. The only record kept is the server access log, which captures truncated network addresses and is rotated on a short cycle.
  • No qualified TSA / eIDAS issuance. Where an EU-qualified electronic timestamp is required for regulated contracts, that requirement is properly met by a qualified trust service provider in the relevant jurisdiction.

If Orphograph closes

See the longer note for the full account. In short: every receipt remains valid, because the trust resides in Bitcoin and in an open standard, not in this office. A local copy of the verifier renders the holder independent of the office's continued existence.

Correspondence

Mail addressed to [email protected] reaches the office. Replies are written by a person on an ordinary schedule.

Security disclosures should mention "security" in the subject line. Any matter that could plausibly affect the validity of a receipt is treated as the highest priority.

One-line history

A photographer asked how to prove that a photograph existed before a given training run. The honest answer was that OpenTimestamps would do exactly that, but only via a Python command-line tool. The founder asked for a weekend. That weekend became this office.

This page is maintained by the founder. Last revised 2026-05-19.

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