The deliverable
The Confidence Report
For each verification type, the appliance prepares a dated, SHA-256-anchored, secret-free document with the verification results and their limits. See below for details and examples.
The document is re-checkable by anyone with standard tools. No account, no vendor call. It holds no seed words, no private key, no passphrase and no balance by design.
The reports can be assembled in specific packages such as Inheritance, proof of control, or verification package, and signed on or off device for attestation purposes. See the preview for more information.
Download this sample Read one field by field ↓ Every report in the preview →
Read this first
What different report types can prove
IT PROVES
- Provenance These keys derive the expected addresses, across four derivation standards at once.
- Control Someone can sign with the key.
- Wallet definition The wallet policy is what you were told it is.
- Privacy What a spend would reveal, before you sign.
- Recoverability The backup shares rebuild the secret at the threshold they claim.
IT DOES NOT PROVE
- Not ownership Control of a key on the day it was made, not legal title.
- Not balances No amounts. No chain read.
- Not tomorrow True on its date, and nothing after it.
- Not other devices A cosigner signing on their own hardware is out of scope.
How to read one
Seven main sections of a Confidence Report.
-
The privacy statement
The report is financially sensitive even though it holds no secret keys. The extended public keys the document lists cannot spend, but they reveal every past transaction and every future address of the account to anyone holding them.
-
What was verified
One block answering what was checked, and when. The date is an important boundary. Everything below it was true on that day, nothing is claimed after. The master fingerprint is the four bytes your hardware wallet shows. A match means the report was built from the seed you think it was. A watch-only xpub prints an account-key fingerprint instead and a multisig the BIP380 descriptor checksum, because neither can see a master key.
AIR-GAP VERIFIEDmeans the station checked itself at the moment of the run: no interfaces up, no routes, nothing listening. -
The handover block
Ruled lines for notaries, CPAs, attorneys and third-parties. The appliance leaves them blank to be signed by hand. An attorney, CPA or executor inherits a chain of custody on the face of the page.
-
The seed pattern, and why this one is red
A verification does not score entropy. Bitcoin Witness reads the seed’s own bits, names any structure it finds, and prints this line only when something was flagged. Here three checks fired at once: all symbols identical, a long repeated run, highly repetitive, because this report was built from a published test vector. An entropy estimate appears only on Seed Generation reports with coins or dice, where the station analyzes the throws the users enter.
-
How to re-verify
Three steps, printed on the report itself. No seed, no password, and no software of ours. Every record in the set carries these instructions.
-
The recovery path
One line saying what a person could do to recover the backup depending on the backup format (BIP39, BIP85, SeedXOR, and others). It appears on the shapes that have a backup to recover, and not on a watch-only xpub, or a message signature, because those have nothing to re-enter.
-
The document guards itself
The SHA-256 in the footer covers the report’s own text: every byte above the blank line that precedes the Report SHA-256: line, up to the last character of that text and not the line break after it. Change one character anywhere on the page and it stops matching, on paper or on disk. Recompute it with any sha256 tool over that text. A plain whole-file checksum does not match it, and that mismatch is expected. A copy saved with terminal colour codes is hashed with those codes removed. No seed, no software of ours, and no account.
Deliberately absent
- No seed words, no private key, no passphrase. Which is what makes it safe to store (read the privacy note on the report).
- No balance. The record stays true forever about its stated day. Check a balance yourself in any online watch-only wallet.
- No account, no login, no company in the loop. The math re-verifies without us. If Bitcoin Witness disappeared tomorrow, every line of this document would still check out.
Nine shapes
More examples below
A different record shape for different verification types.
-
Click to enlarge
Provenance
Seed Verification
A phrase rebuilds the wallet it claims. Four derivation standards at once, so you compare against the matching prefix instead of guessing a path.
-
Click to enlarge
Provenance
Extended Public Key Verification
The same derivation with no seed entered. It reports an account-key fingerprint and the parent fingerprint above it, not the wallet's master fingerprint, which watch-only cannot see. The sample shown is the four-template key at six sheets. The download is the published six-sheet PDF.
-
Click to enlarge
Wallet definition
Multisig Verification
The whole policy read back, and what it cannot check named on its face. A 2-of-3 has no master fingerprint. Its identity is the BIP380 descriptor checksum.
-
Click to enlarge
Recoverability
SLIP-39 Backup Verification
Shares checked against the threshold they claim. The recovered secret is a BIP32 seed that skips PBKDF2, so the report states that too.
-
Click to enlarge
Provenance
Seed Generation
The record for a seed made on the station from dice or coin flips. The only shape that scores entropy, because it is the only one that watched the throws being entered.
Four more shapes ship in the sample set.
-
Recoverability
Codex32 Backup Verification
A paper-computable Shamir backup carrying its own printed checksum (BIP-93).
-
Control
Message Verification
Verify-only: evidence that whoever signed it controlled the address. BIP322 or BIP137. Nothing here can move a coin.
-
Control
Message Signature Verification
The other half of the pair: the station signs the challenge from the seed you entered, then re-verifies its own signature. Proof that this device controls the address.
-
Provenance
BIP85 Child Verification
One master seed can produce many standalone wallets. The child is checked against the master it came from, at the path printed in the record. A passphrase you later add to the child is a separate secret.
Who it is for
What each reader does with it.
-
Self-custodian
Reads the derivation table against the addresses your own wallet shows. A backup that does not match gets a refusal, not a log line.
-
Multisig group
Reads the descriptor checksum and every cosigner key aloud, before a coin is funded. Each cosigner confirms the whole descriptor on their own device.
-
Writing an estate plan
Puts it in the folder beside the sealed backup, so an heir inherits a record of what the backup opens, not just a phrase.
-
Executor, attorney or CPA
Reads the first page in plain words, re-checks any line with a watch-only wallet, and recomputes one hash to know the page is intact. Nothing to install.
-
Proving control to a counterparty
Hands over one of the two Message shapes or a proof-of-control batch: a fresh challenge signed per address, with no coins moved.
Keep reading
Bitcoin Witness is a
complete airgapped verification layer.
The station verifies, generates, signs and prepares packages to hand over.
Review our specifications page and a dedicated security page.