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The proof bundle

When you finish your book, BlindProof gives you a single file — a proof bundle — that you send to your publisher alongside the manuscript. It is small, sober, and readable. It proves the manuscript you are delivering is the one you have been working on all along.

flowchart LR
    M[Your manuscript] --> P[Your publisher]
    B[The proof bundle<br/>one PDF, one small checker] --> P
    P --> V[Run the checking tool]
    V --> R[Confirmed: this manuscript<br/>existed on these dates]

What is in it

The bundle is a zip file containing four items. Most of the time only the first matters to you:

  • The PDF. A calm, plainly-typeset document. The first page is an attestation of authorship. The following pages show your writing timeline — days you worked, word counts, sessions — a short cryptographic appendix, and a single page of instructions for the publisher. It contains zero words from your manuscript.
  • A canonical record. A small machine-readable file that holds the fingerprints of your saves, the dates on which each batch was registered, and the stamps from the public registrar. This is what the checking tool reads.
  • A signature. A short file that proves the canonical record came from BlindProof and has not been altered since.
  • The checking tool. A tiny script — under a couple of hundred lines — that your publisher can run. It works on any computer that has a recent Python installed and it does not phone home to BlindProof. It verifies everything on its own, against the public registrar.

What your publisher does

Your publisher runs the checking tool on your manuscript. They pass it the bundle and, when they want to confirm the manuscript itself matches the timeline, the manuscript file as well. The tool then confirms four things in turn:

  1. The signature on the bundle is genuine.
  2. The day-by-day timeline reconciles to the public stamps the bundle claims.
  3. Each of those public stamps is real, by checking against the registrar directly.
  4. The fingerprint of the manuscript file they hold matches one of the saves in the timeline — that is, the exact file they received was a save you registered, on the date you registered it.

If all four hold, the tool reports PASS, with the date and a reference to the public record anyone can check. If the manuscript is different from any save in your timeline — even by a comma — the tool reports NOT MATCHED plainly, and the publisher knows.

The fingerprints in the bundle are made under a different one-time key for each save, and only the one your publisher needs to confirm a particular manuscript is revealed in the bundle. That means a publisher can verify the manuscript they hold without learning anything about the rest of your timeline — abandoned drafts, sentences you tried and removed, the long tail of intermediate saves — beyond the dates and word counts already shown in the PDF.

How to recognise a BlindProof bundle

Every bundle BlindProof produces is signed with the same long-lived key. Its fingerprint — a short identifier impossible to fake without holding the key itself — is:

515e 2080 8334 3640

The checking tool prints this same value when it runs, so a publisher can compare the two by eye. If they match, the bundle was issued by BlindProof and not by anyone else. If they differ, the tool refuses to confirm and says so plainly.

You will not normally need to think about this. The fingerprint is here so a careful publisher — or one who wants independent corroboration outside any document you give them — can confirm authenticity from a separate source.

What it does not prove

The bundle proves when the manuscript existed and that it is the same file you worked on throughout. It does not, by itself, prove which human was at the keyboard. For that, conventional evidence still matters — your contract, your drafts, your correspondence, your relationship with your publisher. The bundle is one more thing in the stack, and the one thing that is harder to forge than all the others combined.

How long it remains valid

Indefinitely. The registrar's stamps live outside BlindProof, in a public record that is widely mirrored and designed to outlast individual companies. A bundle produced today will still check out ten or twenty years from now, regardless of whether BlindProof is still here.