What is this

All 31,102 verses of the King James Bible are hashed into a Merkle tree. Its root:

b582b85df0c86c09e9fd31bb4e02c7d385911ccc43db964ca6fcea6edb23f261

That root is anchored in Bitcoin via OpenTimestamps (block 956957, mined 2026-07-06 23:14 UTC). If even one letter of one verse were altered, its proof would no longer reach the root. Since that block, altering any letter of any verse would require rewriting Bitcoin's blockchain.

The World English Bible (WEB), a modern-English public-domain translation, is sealed the same way — all 31,098 of its verses under their own root, stamped via OpenTimestamps on 2026-08-31:

f80fd9540cc56142809db3b20c679b98dea09fec6ba92397605c753cd1257cbf

(The WEB has 31,098 verses, not the KJV's 31,102: following its Greek sources it omits Luke 17:36, Acts 8:37, Acts 15:34 and Acts 24:7, and numbers the Romans doxology 14:24–26 rather than 16:25–27.)

How verification works

Your browser hashes the verse text (SHA-256), then folds in the proof, one sibling hash per level of the tree (about fifteen of them), and checks that the result equals the anchored root. Each pairing doubles the span of text the running hash vouches for: 1 verse, 2, 4, 8… until a single hash speaks for the whole Bible. The API is not trusted; the math is.

What it doesn't prove

The anchor proves the text hasn't changed since it was sealed, not that the seal was applied to a perfect text. That part rests on cross-checking two independently produced digital sources of each translation at build time (for the KJV, ebible.org's eng-kjv against an independent digital KJV, 30,069 of 31,102 verses byte-identical; for the WEB, its publisher eBible.org's own text against an independently parsed copy), with every difference reviewed and documented in the project spec.

Verify it yourself

Each sealed root and its OpenTimestamps proof are published here:

curl -O https://blockbible.net/kjv-root.txt
curl -O https://blockbible.net/kjv-root.txt.ots
ots verify kjv-root.txt.ots -f kjv-root.txt

curl -O https://blockbible.net/web-root.txt
curl -O https://blockbible.net/web-root.txt.ots
ots verify web-root.txt.ots -f web-root.txt

The proof is self-contained: it walks from the file's hash, through the calendar aggregation, to the merkle root of a Bitcoin block header. Four independent calendar servers anchored it in blocks 956957, 956960, 956963, and 956970, so the proof holds even if three of the four vanish.