Catalog

A New Standard for Responsible Asset Stewardship

Intro

Catalog is a reference application for a new standard in responsible asset stewardship, delivered as an integrated suite for the people and organizations that create, hold, manage, preserve, or protect intellectual, creative, legal, cultural, and organizational assets.

Established preservation frameworks, including OAIS (ISO 14721), the trusted digital repository audit standard ISO 16363, and their derivatives, were built around making preserved material as readable as possible, for as long as possible. They do not address the opposite case: assets that must not be publicly readable. These standards describe how to preserve files. They are silent on how to preserve authorship, provenance, rights, context, access, and trust, and on how to record each asset's lifecycle as part of its own metadata: its creation, handling, repackaging, and the correspondence, decisions, and collaboration that surround that work. Catalog raises the bar on every one of these.

The suite includes software modules for identity, payments, mail, chat, asset registration, metadata management, digital rights management, file storage and publishing. Each module is usable on its own, but all modules are designed to interoperate, so that together they form a single working environment in which every activity that produces, extends or manages assets is recorded, protected with quantum-secure encryption, and anchored to a public blockchain while the content itself stays private. Over time, this builds a durable, independently verifiable record of the assets in your care and the activity around them, held under your own control.

Catalog grew out of its founder's need to manage a lifetime of work as a creative, and his extensive personal collection of non-fiction books dating back to 1733. Roberto Bourgonjen brings over twenty years of professional experience developing software for major institutional archives in the Netherlands. Catalog was engineered from the ground up after his retirement from business, as a private undertaking. It is designed for massive, global scale, built on archival practice and standards proven at national scale, while its usability and feature set were shaped around the founder's own needs to manage his own archive and communication. Today the founder runs the platform himself, as a private project for his own archive, and the software is made available to end users on an as-is basis. The current arrangement is described under Governance below.

Catalog.ID: Identity & Membership

Every Catalog member has a Catalog.ID, a digital identity that gives you full control over what personal information you share, and with whom. Your data is encrypted before it ever reaches the server; only you hold the keys.

With a Catalog.ID, you can attribute yourself in your own work, and others can attribute you in theirs, in a way that is cryptographically verifiable and indisputable. Combined with the Catalog Provenance Registry (CPR), this means your contributions can be recognized and proven, whether you made them yourself or someone else acknowledged your role.

But Catalog.ID is more than a technical identity layer. It is a membership. Every member accepts the same set of rules: the same confidentiality and consent standards, the same intellectual property and attribution expectations, and the same dispute process with real consequences for doxxing, leaks, and infringement. When two Catalog.ID members collaborate, they do so inside a shared legal and behavioral framework, making it a safe environment to share work, ideas, and personal information.

Catalog.ID is designed to run on several nodes, each holding a complete replica of every account, so that the failure of a single node cannot lock anyone out. It is currently run by the founder. For a full technical description, see the Catalog.ID Whitepaper.

Catalog Provenance Registry (CPR)

Throughout Catalog, every meaningful action, a file upload, a mail sent, a task recording, a chat conversation, is registered as a signed claim in the Catalog Provenance Registry (CPR). Each claim records what happened, who was involved, and when, and is anchored to the XRP Ledger to produce a publicly verifiable timestamp. The result is durable, independent proof that a claim existed at or before a certain point in time, without relying on any single party's word.

CPR is designed to run on a network of nodes. Each node maintains its own blockchain, accepts claims independently, and replicates blocks from peers, so that any node can verify any claim regardless of where it originated. The system is designed to be post-quantum secure at the claim and archive layer, ensuring that records made today remain verifiable even as cryptographic capabilities advance. Every signature and key exchange is performed with both a classical and a post-quantum algorithm, so that an attacker must break both. The construction is described in the Hybrid Cryptography Briefing.

CPR does not adjudicate truth or legal title; it records claims. But by making those claims independently timestamped, cryptographically signed, and durably preserved across several nodes, it provides the kind of evidence that can support authorship disputes, provenance verification, and long-term accountability. For a full technical description, see the CPR Whitepaper.

Catalog Filestorage (CFS)

Catalog Filestorage (CFS) stores your files for the long term: decades to centuries, including work that should outlive its author. It is preservation infrastructure, not a working file share. Your working copy stays on your own machine; CFS keeps the preserved copies.

Encrypted, with the key in your hands. Every file is encrypted before it is stored. The service, its mirrors and its archive caches hold ciphertext only and cannot read what they hold. The key is small enough to print on paper and keep in a safe.

Copies on disk, tape and offline tape. Online disk serves everyday retrieval. Tape in an automated library covers recovery. Offline tape, ejected and stored off-site, is the unconditional preservation copy, out of reach of ransomware, credential compromise and mistaken commands. Online availability is a convenience, kept under normal conditions. Preservation on offline tape is kept regardless. Nothing is rented from a cloud provider: the operator owns every drive and tape it serves from.

Pay once, preserved indefinitely. A single ingestion fee funds preservation for good. There is no subscription, no renewal and no expiry. Retrieval is metered per use through Bitcash.

Verifiable and shareable. Every package is signed by its publisher and timestamped at ingestion, so anyone who retrieves it can verify that the bytes are the ones the publisher sealed, and when. Sharing works through Catalog.ID: the package key is sealed under the recipient's keys, with both a classical and a post-quantum algorithm, and a revoked key stops further delivery immediately.

CFS is currently run by the founder. For a full technical description, see the Catalog Filestorage Whitepaper.

Bitcash®: Payments & Access

Catalog needs to run servers, store data, and deliver content, all of which cost money. The conventional answers are advertising, data monetization, or subscriptions. Advertising requires surveillance. Data monetization turns users into the product. Subscriptions create access barriers. Bitcash replaces all of these with pay-per-use micropayments: you pay only for what you consume, in amounts small enough to be affordable, without surrendering personal data.

BIT is the prepaid credit used within Catalog. You load a Bitcash Wallet, and services are metered as you use them: uploads, downloads, storage, streaming, API calls, compute tasks. No account is required for basic spending; a wallet code works like cash. BIT is not a cryptocurrency and not an investment product. It is a prepaid service credit, comparable to a stored-value card, and it is not redeemable for cash. BIT is issued and accepted by one party, acting in two roles: as the Bitcash Administrator it issues BIT and keeps the ledger, and as an Operator it accepts BIT for the services it delivers and for access to the content its sites carry, and pays the authors of that content their royalties in money.

This model also protects published content. Because every access requires a BIT payment, there is no free bulk endpoint to scrape. Mass harvesting of content, whether for unauthorized redistribution or AI training, becomes economically prohibitive, and every request is individually logged and accountable.

Today no BIT is sold. The founder holds both roles, runs the platform himself and issues BIT free of charge: as gifts carried by invitations to Catalog.ID, and for his own use of the platform, for testing and for demonstration. The full current arrangement is set out on bit.cash, and the technical description in the Bitcash Whitepaper.

Mail & Messaging

Catalog includes mail and messaging, designed for both privacy and long-term preservation. Email is stored encrypted at the server, with the option to keep a fully synced copy of all mail on your own computer, enabling private full-text search across your entire correspondence. All incoming and outgoing mails are treated as assets and registered at the Catalog Provenance Registry (CPR).

Chat messaging follows the same principles: messages are preserved long-term, automatically partitioned into conversations, treated as assets and registered to the CPR. The result is a complete, searchable record of every discussion and decision, not just the outcomes but the reasoning behind them.

We use these tools ourselves. Every dialog and decision-making process behind the development of Catalog has been captured and is searchable, with corresponding screenshots, going back to 2011.

Task Management

Catalog includes a task management system that allows you to organize and manage your own tasks, and lets you share tasks with contractors or coworkers. It comes with integrated invoicing and payment management. Every task can be recorded through 1-frame-per-second desktop recording, camera capture, and full activity logging, thereby automatically documenting every draft, revision, decision, and collaboration, including work done with AI. These captures are timestamped to the blockchain, turning the creative process itself into irrefutable, verifiable evidence of each contributor's input. In an era where authorship is increasingly difficult to prove, working without this kind of record is like driving without insurance: you may not need it every day, but when you do, nothing else will take its place.

Governance

Catalog is currently run by its founder, Roberto Bourgonjen, as a private project for his own archive. He develops the software, runs the servers and operates every service himself. The servers are his property. They are housed by Stichting Outpapier, a Dutch non-profit foundation whose task is the preservation of physical material and the physical housing of the servers that hold its digitised counterpart, and which does not operate them.

One party stands behind every service, Bitcash included: the party that issues the prepaid credit, as the Bitcash Administrator, is the party that accepts it and pays authors their royalties, as an Operator. When a payment unit passes between independent legal entities, every hand-over is a legal relationship of its own, and what one participant does can endanger the whole network and make the others liable. Keeping every role in one hand avoids that.

Availability

If you are interested in Catalog, you are welcome to explore the whitepapers for Catalog.ID, CPR, Catalog Filestorage, and Bitcash to learn more about the platform and its underlying systems. For anything else, the founder can be reached through roberto.me.

The software and the services are provided under the Catalog EULA and Cloud Services Terms and the CPR Terms. How personal data is handled is described in the Privacy Policy.