Bitcash® Micropayments

What is Bitcash?

Bitcash is a prepaid micropayment system for digital services and content — a simple way to pay for what you actually use, without subscriptions, without ads, and without giving up your personal data.

Bitcash is the payments module of Catalog, an integrated suite of applications for creatives and other intellectual-property producers — covering identity (Catalog.ID), payments (Bitcash), mail, chat, a provenance and claims registry (Catalog Provenance Registry / CPR), metadata management, digital rights management, and file storage and delivery. Inside Catalog, Bitcash meters every billable action — uploads, downloads, storage, streaming, API calls — so that infrastructure is paid for directly by the people using it.

When you use services or access content that require payments with Bitcash, you pay only for what you actually use. No monthly fees, no hidden costs, no data tracking. Just straightforward, small payments for the things you access.

How It Works

You load a Bitcash Wallet with BIT — a prepaid credit that works like a digital gift card. Once loaded, you can use BIT to access services and content across the Catalog application suite: downloading files, streaming media, storing documents, and more.

Each action costs a small amount of BIT, often just fractions of a cent. You stay in control of your spending at all times, and you never pay for more than you use.

Your Wallet, Your Way

A Bitcash Wallet is identified by a Wallet Code — a short string of letters and numbers that is automatically generated by your browser and works like cash. You don't need to create an account or provide personal information to use it. Just enter your Wallet Code on a supported site and start using services right away.

You can also share your Wallet Code with someone else as a gift, or transfer BIT between wallets.

Because your Wallet Code works like cash, keep it safe — if someone else gets hold of it, they can spend your balance. Only enter it on websites you trust.

What BIT Is — and What It Isn't

BIT is prepaid credit for digital services and content that are provided by Stichting Outpapier. It is not a cryptocurrency, not an investment, and not redeemable for cash. Think of it as a stored-value card for the digital world — you load it, you use it, and it pays for the services you consume.

Who Operates Bitcash?

The Bitcash server software runs under license on servers operated by Stichting Outpapier, a non-profit foundation based in the Netherlands. Revenue from BIT sales goes directly toward running and maintaining the servers and infrastructure that deliver services to you. There are no shareholders, no investors, and no advertising — just a foundation working to keep digital services accessible and affordable.

Why Bitcash?

Most online services are funded by advertising, data collection, or expensive subscriptions. Bitcash offers an alternative:

  • No ads. Your attention is not the product.
  • No data harvesting. You don't need to hand over personal information to use services.
  • No subscriptions. Pay only for what you use, when you use it.
  • Content protection. Because every access requires a small payment, published content is protected against mass scraping and unauthorized bulk downloading.

Getting BIT

When you visit a site that requires BIT payments, you'll see a Bitcash icon at the top of the page. Click it to open the wallet interface, where you can load BIT by paying in euros. The current price is €1 for 5,000 BIT. The BIT is credited to your wallet immediately, and you can start using services right away.

You can load your wallet and use it at your own pace.

Try Bitcash

You can try Bitcash right now by visiting get.info or roberto.me. On both sites you'll find Bitcash-protected pictures and videos with a "Buy Bits" link displayed over them — click it to load a wallet and unlock the content.

  • get.info is an ongoing project dedicated to the preservation and digitization of historical encyclopedias from around the world, making them searchable as a living archive of recorded knowledge.
  • roberto.me is the personal website of Bitcash's founder, bringing together documents, images, audio, and video from different periods of his life and work. All visual and audio material on the site requires payment to access.

All proceeds from both sites go directly to Stichting Outpapier, which supports the preservation and presentation of the founder's archive.

The Bitcash Wallet Manager

For anyone who wants to hold more than one wallet, send BIT as a gift, or keep an organized record of their wallets and transactions, there is the Bitcash Wallet Manager — a free desktop application for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It stores your Wallet Codes safely using your operating system's built-in secret store (Windows DPAPI, macOS Keychain, or GNOME Keyring / KWallet on Linux), so your codes are never kept in plain text.

With the Wallet Manager you can:

  • create new wallets and import existing ones;
  • organize wallets with labels, notes, and a tree view of child wallets;
  • check balances, expiration, and activity at a glance;
  • issue Gift Vouchers and Demo Wallets, transfer BIT between your own wallets, and create Receive Addresses so others can send BIT to you (sending BIT to a Receive Address requires a Catalog.ID membership, but anyone can create one to receive);
  • reveal or export a Wallet Code only when you explicitly choose to share or back it up.

The Wallet Manager is a module of the Catalog Dashboard, the desktop host application for all Catalog client modules. Install the Dashboard first, then the Bitcash module.

Windows. Download and run the two installers in order:

  1. Catalog Dashboard (catalog-dashboard.msi)
  2. Bitcash module (catalog-bitcash.msi)

Linux (Ubuntu/Debian). Open a terminal and run:

curl -fsSL https://install.catalog.org/linux/ubuntu/install-client.sh | sudo bash
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install catalog-bitcash

macOS. A public macOS release is not yet available. It is expected in June 2026.

Once installed, launch the Catalog Dashboard and open the Bitcash module to start managing your wallets.

Learn More

If you're a creator, artist, writer, or publisher looking for a sustainable way to share your work — protected against mass scraping and AI harvesting, and supported directly by the people who enjoy it — Bitcash is built for you. For a detailed description of how it works, including the issuance model, economic structure, and compliance framework, see the Bitcash Whitepaper.

For purchasing BIT, webshop terms, support, and contact information, visit outpapier.nl. Creators and publishers who want to put their own work behind Bitcash — and have the proceeds support both their work and the infrastructure that delivers it — can also reach out to Stichting Outpapier through the same site to discuss using Catalog for their publishing.

Bitcash® is a registered trademark of Roberto Bourgonjen.

This website is hosted by Stichting Outpapier using Catalog Publisher