Putting our own word on the chain.
- Problem
- A crypto company's promise not to rug-pull is worth nothing if the promise itself can be quietly rewritten later.
- Tool chosen
- A plain text file, SHA-256, and OpenTimestamps anchoring to the Bitcoin blockchain. No token. No smart contract. No account.
- Why
- The claim being protected is "this exact text existed on this date and hasn't changed." That is precisely — and only — what a timestamp proof does. Anything heavier would be theater.
The problem, plainly
Crypto's ugliest trick is the vanishing act: hype it, sell it, disappear. We wrote a pledge that we will never do that — no coin of our own, self-funded, what we build for you is yours. But a pledge on a website is just pixels a webmaster can edit. The trust problem isn't whether we'd say the words. It's whether you could catch us changing them.
What we considered — and rejected
- Just publish it. Free, but editable without a trace. The exact failure we're addressing.
- A signed PDF. Better, but the signing key is ours — we'd be vouching for ourselves.
- A smart contract. Real permanence, but overkill: it drags in a token ecosystem to store one paragraph. A perfect example of the chain not earning its place.
The tool that earned its place
OpenTimestamps takes a fingerprint of a file — a SHA-256 hash — and anchors it into the Bitcoin blockchain through free public calendar servers. It costs nothing, involves no token, and requires trusting no one: anyone can independently verify that a file matching this fingerprint existed by a given date.
The pledge lives at spurcrypto.com/pledge.txt, the proof at pledge.txt.ots, and a machine-readable manifest at /proofs/long-haul-pledge/. Our homepage carries an in-browser verifier: one click, and your browser hashes the served file and compares it to the anchored fingerprint. If we ever edit a word, the proof breaks in public.
What this does not prove
Honesty is the product, so here are the limits. A timestamp proof shows a file existed unchanged at a point in time. It does not prove intentions, identity, or that the words are true — it proves we said them then, and haven't quietly reworded them since. It is not legal notarization. The enforcement mechanism is reputational: silent edits become publicly detectable, forever.
The same mechanism, for your records
This case study is our own product used on ourselves. The identical pipeline — hash, anchor, verification page, monthly report — is what we sell as the Integrity Packet: receipts, policies, board minutes, build logs, anything whose history someone might one day dispute.
Worth including: what needs proving, who needs to trust it, and what happens if it changes.