Real or Fake? Try the Verification Yourself

Counterfeiting creates a basic but difficult question: Is this the authentic product issued by its claimed creator, or is it an unauthorized copy?

LiTPOW is an attempt to give artists, makers, and independent publishers a practical way to help answer that question. The first implementation supports a limited edition of my family’s baseball card game.

You can try it yourself using a sample credential.

Sample credential

• Edition: Sample
• Serial number: 20567810
• Passphrase: diamond-river

Visit the Baseball Product Verification Tool. Choose “Sample,” enter the serial number and passphrase exactly as shown, and select Verify.

The tool should find a corresponding authenticity record. Changing either value should prevent a match.

What happens behind the scenes?

The serial number and passphrase are combined and processed by SHA-256, a one-way cryptographic hash function. The same input produces the same digital fingerprint, while the fingerprint does not reveal the original input.

LiTPOW previously published the sample fingerprint as data in a transaction on the Bitcoin SV blockchain. During verification, the tool calculates the fingerprint from your entries and searches the edition’s transactions for a match.

What does a match prove?

A match demonstrates that:

• The entered credential corresponds to a fingerprint published for the selected edition.
• The published fingerprint has not been silently altered in the blockchain record.
• Anyone can inspect the underlying public transaction independently.

A match does not, by itself, prove:

• Who currently owns or possesses a physical item
• That the person entering the credential is authorized to use it
• That every physical component of an item has been inspected
• That a credential has never been copied or disclosed

Those distinctions are important. LiTPOW provides evidence associated with an issued product credential; packaging, credential handling, and verification history can add further signals.

Future versions are intended to distinguish a credential’s first recorded successful verification from later successful checks. For now, this demonstration tests the foundational question: can a customer easily compare a physical product credential with durable, public evidence?

Try the verification tool and then tell us what the result means to you.