How we prove your minute exists, without crypto

A minute on Buy The Time is a record: your name, a title, a message, sometimes a photo. The obvious question is what stops that record from quietly changing, or disappearing, years from now. Our answer is that you should not have to trust us.

What happens after you pay

We take a SHA-256 fingerprint of your record. A fingerprint is a short string of letters and numbers that changes completely if a single character of the record changes. We send only that fingerprint, never your content, to OpenTimestamps, a free and open standard run by independent servers. They bundle it with thousands of others and write one combined proof into a Bitcoin block.

Within about 1 to 12 hours your minute page switches from Pending to Confirmed and shows the block it landed in.

How to check it yourself

1. Open your minute page and choose Download proof.
2. Go to opentimestamps.org and drop the proof file in.
3. The site tells you the date the record was anchored, using the public Bitcoin blockchain, not our database.

What it is not

It is not a token, not an NFT and not an investment. There is no wallet, nothing to sell and nothing that changes in value. You own a public record; the blockchain simply makes it provable that the record existed at that moment and has not been rewritten.

Why it matters for a gift

Commercial star registries keep names in their own catalogue, and different companies can sell the same star twice. A minute has one owner, and now anyone can verify the record independently. That is the difference between a certificate and a proof.