Proving What’s Real

In the late 1920s, my great-grandfather designed a playing-card game that simulates real baseball. Nearly a century later, I decided to update it with revised rules and new artwork for a new generation of players.

As I worked on the game, I encountered a troubling question:

What would stop someone from copying everything I had made? The rules, the artwork, the product—even the legacy of my family?

Copyright law provides important rights, but enforcement is often slow. Forgers can move quickly. A convincing lookalike can be produced and marketed before a small creator knows it exists.

Large brands can invest in specialized packaging, enforcement teams, and expensive anti-counterfeiting systems. Independent artists, craftspeople, and local creators rarely have the same resources.

That is why I began building LiTPOW.

LiTPOW grew beyond the baseball game into an experiment in provable authenticity for physical products. Its purpose is not to make copying impossible or replace legal protection. It is to help creators issue product credentials that customers can independently check.

How the first implementation works

Each deck in the first edition has a serial number and passphrase. LiTPOW combines those values and calculates a one-way cryptographic hash—a digital fingerprint that does not disclose the original credential.

That fingerprint is stored in timestamped data on the Bitcoin SV blockchain. When someone enters the correct information into LiTPOW’s verification tool, the tool calculates the fingerprint again and looks for a matching published record.

The customer does not need an app, a cryptocurrency account, or an understanding of Bitcoin. The ledger operates in the background as a durable public record.

A matching credential establishes that LiTPOW issued that credential for the product edition. It does not, on its own, establish the current owner or inspect every physical characteristic of the item. It gives creators and customers a verifiable signal that is much harder to imitate than a slogan or paper certificate alone.

From a family project to a creator tool

The baseball game is LiTPOW’s first published product and working proof of concept. It gave me a real object, a limited edition, and a story worth protecting.

The larger question is whether the same approach can help a printmaker, jeweler, ceramicist, independent publisher, or local producer distinguish official work from unauthorized copies.

That is what I am now testing.

Read about the baseball proof of concept or try the verification yourself.