The Value of Real Things
Authenticity carries emotional and financial value. LiTPOW began as a way to protect a family baseball game and is being developed for artists and small-batch makers.
Read insightA new approach to product authentication
LiTPOW helps creators give physical products verifiable identities, so customers have stronger evidence of what is real.
A creator builds an audience around original work. Then the copies appear: duplicated designs, forged packaging, false signatures, and products that claim to be handmade or locally made.
Counterfeiters can reproduce appearances and marketing claims quickly. Independent creators may spend months or years pursuing legal remedies, if they have the resources to pursue them at all.
The damage goes beyond a lost sale. When customers cannot distinguish an authentic product from an imitation, trust in the creator and the value of the real work can begin to erode.
LiTPOW associates physical products with unique credentials that customers can check online.
A customer enters the credentials supplied with a product. LiTPOW compares them with durable, publicly inspectable evidence published for the official edition.
A successful match shows that the credential was issued for an authentic product. A copied logo, package, signature, or paper certificate cannot create that matching record on its own.
A creator publishes a product or limited edition with unique credentials.
A customer enters the product’s edition, serial number, and passphrase.
LiTPOW checks the credentials against the edition’s published authenticity records and explains the result.
Future versions are intended to report whether a valid credential is being verified for the first recorded time or has been successfully checked before.
Bedard’s Universal Baseball is a card game first published by my great-grandfather in 1927 and revised for a new generation nearly a century later.
It is also the first product published and authenticated by LiTPOW.
Every deck in its first edition includes a serial number and passphrase corresponding to a public authenticity record. The game gives LiTPOW a real physical product, not merely a technical concept, through which to test product verification.
LiTPOW does not make physical copying impossible. It does not replace copyright, trademark, consumer-protection laws, or careful inspection of a product.
It gives creators and customers an additional form of evidence: a way to check whether product credentials were issued as part of an authentic edition.
The objective is not to claim that counterfeiting can disappear. It is to make the authentic product easier to identify and harder to impersonate convincingly.
LiTPOW is being developed for people whose work gains value from its origin, story, scarcity, and connection to its creator.
LiTPOW uses cryptographic fingerprints and timestamped Bitcoin records to make product credentials independently checkable and resistant to later alteration.
Customers do not need to purchase cryptocurrency, create a blockchain wallet, download an app, or understand the underlying technology.
For visitors who want to inspect more deeply, LiTPOW provides links to the public records and its root certification.
Explore the ideas
Read about creator trust, counterfeit risk, product provenance, public evidence, and lessons from LiTPOW’s first authenticated product.
Authenticity carries emotional and financial value. LiTPOW began as a way to protect a family baseball game and is being developed for artists and small-batch makers.
Read insightA story about what a convincing counterfeit can cost an independent printmaker and the collectors who support the work.
Read insightA nearly century-old baseball game prompted a modern question: how can independent creators give customers durable proof of an authentic product?
Read insight