The BeatTime Manifesto

26 September 2026 · Adam Koch

This is a machine translation of the original Polish text. The Polish original is the authoritative version: read it in Polish.

Don’t trust. Verify.

BeatTime grew out of a simple question: why, in order to prove that data existed at a certain time and was not changed afterwards, do we have to pay for trust in an institution, when in many cases anyone can check that truth for themselves — institutions, government administration and courts included?

Over the years we have built a digital world on intermediaries of trust. An institution holds certificates, passes audits, maintains costly infrastructure and pays for compliance. And then the user pays for access to the proof obtained from it.

I am not saying that certification is worthless. I am not saying that qualified trust services are unnecessary. I am saying something simpler: regulatory status must not be mistaken for mathematical truth.

A certificate does not change the mathematics

A hash function does not know who paid for the audit. A digital signature does not know a company’s share capital. A Merkle proof does not check the certificates hanging on the wall.

Cryptographic verification produces a result because certain mathematical relations hold — not because someone once obtained the right to call their service qualified.

A certificate can change the way the law tries to treat a proof, but it cannot change the mathematics of that proof. This distinction is the foundation of BeatTime.

European Union law grants qualified electronic time stamps a presumption of the accuracy of the date they indicate and of the integrity of the data bound to it (eIDAS, Article 41(2)). That presumption is conferred by the legislator. It is not a mathematical theorem.

The same article states that an electronic time stamp shall not be denied legal effect or admissibility as evidence solely because it does not meet the requirements of a qualified time stamp (Article 41(1)).

Let me say it plainly: BeatTime is not a qualified trust service provider. Our timestamp does not benefit from that statutory presumption; its evidential value has to follow from the material presented and from the possibility of verifying it — with the help of an expert witness if need be. That is why the whole procedure is written down in a public specification, so that an expert can check our arithmetic, not our word.

The law grants a presumption. Proof demonstrates correctness. One must not be mistaken for the other.

You don’t have to trust BeatTime

That is the most important sentence of this manifesto.

BeatTime was not built for you to trust it. It was built so that you can verify its proof.

The traditional model says: “Trust us. We certify that this happened then.” The BeatTime model says: “You don’t have to believe. Here is the proof. Check it yourself.”

I am not replacing one institution of trust with another. I am reducing the amount of trust you never needed in the first place.

Many witnesses instead of one authority

Mathematics proves integrity and order. It does not prove time. Information about when something happened always comes from a witness. The difference lies in how many witnesses there are — and whether any of them is us.

In BeatTime every weekly Merkle root has several witnesses, none of which is us and none of which is the only one:

That is why, since 25 September 2026, when we issued the first checkpoint, every entry in our log has three times. Only the first is our word. The other two — “not earlier than” and “not later than” — come from Bitcoin blocks and from the bank, and together they bracket the moment at which the entry must have been made. Our clock is not needed for that.

Different courts and different experts trust different things. We anchor the same fact in all of them at once — present the one your court trusts, or all of them together.

Proof that outlives its provider

A company can exist today and be gone in twenty years. It can be sold, go bankrupt, lose its keys, be attacked. This applies to every project exactly as it does to the large TSA infrastructure — ETSI standards provide both for the compromise of a time-stamping unit’s keys and for procedures when a provider ceases operation.

So the right question is not: “Can I trust the company that created this proof?” It is: “Will the proof remain verifiable when that company no longer exists?”

With BeatTime you get a certificate that carries the file’s hash, the inclusion path, the week’s root and references to all the witnesses. The specification is public. Take the checkpoint from an independent copy, not from us. An expert can walk the whole chain from start to finish without a single request to our website.

Evidence should outlive its provider.

Proof that survives the compromise of its creator

This is not theory. We design as if compromise were only a matter of time.

A signing key can leak, a machine can be taken over, an operator can make a mistake. None of these events can alter, invalidate or backdate a stamp that has already been anchored — and we anchor every day.

That is why we anchor the authoritative roots outside our control — in a bank and in Bitcoin — and publish the history of our keys. Anyone holding a certificate can check for themselves whether its root is authoritative, using the tests described in the specification.

Whoever takes over the infrastructure tomorrow may influence the system’s future, but in our case cannot rewrite its documented past. I call this the survivability of proof.

A proof should survive the compromise of its creator.

Reputation must not replace verification

Society has learned to equate the cost of infrastructure, compliance procedures, certification and an organisation’s reputation with the credibility of evidence. These are different things. Compliance shows that an organisation follows procedures. Certification confirms conformity with a standard. The law gives a class of services a special evidential status. None of these makes two plus two any more equal to four.

My criticism is not: “Don’t trust certified systems.” It is: “Don’t use reputation where you can use verification.”

Reputation asks: “Who claims this is true?” Proof asks: “Can you check for yourself that it is true?” BeatTime chooses the second question — and is its complete answer, too.

Not everything has to be a premium service

Selling bottled water makes some sense. You can offer nice packaging, transport, convenience, a quality guarantee, or water where there is no supply. The problem only begins when we start to believe that water becomes water because it has been sealed in a branded bottle.

There are vast areas where we simply need an answer to one question: did this data exist at a given time, and has it not been changed since — an answer backed by mathematical proof and kept by independent sources?

If that question can be answered with publicly and independently verifiable proof, I see no reason why proving that fact should have to be a luxury product. That is why BeatTime is free. No account, no tracking, no file upload — only its hash, computed with a widely used cryptographic hash function on which a large share of today’s data-integrity and blockchain systems rely.

Evidence infrastructure, not a trust authority

We are provider-independent evidence infrastructure. Our website can be offline, the domain can cease to exist, and an expert will still carry out the proof from start to finish.

BeatTime, like the trusted TSA centres, has no monopoly on mathematics. It has no monopoly on time. Nor should it have a monopoly on verifying its own proofs, which is why every mechanism is described and fully verifiable.

If this project is to succeed, its greatest achievement will not be that the world starts to trust BeatTime. It will be that the world no longer has to trust — because everything needed to check the proof will be available independently of us.

I don’t write: trust me. I write: verify me.

Specification: beattime.live/spec · What a timestamp proves: beattime.live/evidence · Public log: beattime.live/checkpoints · Source code: beattime.live/open-source

They sell trust. We publish proof.