The HART Standard: Bitcoin-Native Cryptographic Timestamping for Legally Admissible Research Provenance at $0.008 Per Document

We introduce the HART (Human Auditable and Readable Text) Standard — a Bitcoin-native document timestamping protocol producing legally admissible, cryptographically verifiable provenance certificates at 100x lower cost than existing commercial alternatives. HART anchors document SHA-256 hashes via Bitcoin's OP_RETURN mechanism, batching up to 100 documents per transaction through Merkle tree construction to achieve a per-document cost of $0.008 USD. We document the legal admissibility framework established by French and Italian courts in 2025 and provide a formal security analysis demonstrating 256-bit collision resistance against adversarial timestamp manipulation.