# Verify us before you talk to us

> A real, downloadable evidence bundle — a hash-chained agent action log, a compaction receipt, and a live external witness pin — with the exact commands and quoted outputs to check every claim yourself. Nothing here is a mockup. HTML twin: /verify

Most of the field sends a case study or a call. We send a file.

## The bundle

**arcaeon-verify-bundle** — real run, pinned live, seq 1. An 8-row demo agent action log (hash-chained with `arcaeon-ledger`, an `authority` block on every row, one artefact binding to `https://example.com`) + a compaction receipt from `arcaeon-compact` sealed into the same chain as row 9. Head `chain=9650e32f0feae20f37dbcb6dd9b68826 rows=9` is pinned to Arcaeon's hosted witness under namespace `velouria-demo`, recorded as a public GitHub commit outside our own control.

- [arcaeon-verify-bundle.zip](https://arcaeon.io/bundle/arcaeon-verify-bundle.zip) — all three files
- [demo_agent_log.jsonl](https://arcaeon.io/bundle/demo_agent_log.jsonl)
- [manifest.json](https://arcaeon.io/bundle/manifest.json) — every digest, the witness request/response, public-record links
- [VERIFY.md](https://arcaeon.io/bundle/VERIFY.md) — the full stranger-verification walkthrough

## Check it yourself

**1. Install:** `pip install arcaeon-ledger arcaeon-compact` — `arcaeon-ledger` is stdlib-only; `arcaeon-compact` depends only on it.

**2. Verify the chain:** `python -m arcaeon_ledger.cli verify demo_agent_log.jsonl`

```json
{"ok": true, "rows": 9, "chained": 9, "prechain": 0, "first_break": null}
```

Flip one byte in row 2 (leave `chain` alone) and re-verify — ours came back `{"ok": false, ..., "first_break": "line 2: chain mismatch"}`. Full script in VERIFY.md § 1.

**3. Verify the artefact binding** (row 2, `https://example.com`, re-fetched and recomputed):

```
self-consistency: {'digest_ok': True, 'recipe': 'sha256:raw-bytes:v1', 'refetch': 'skipped', 'notes': []}
with refetch:      {'digest_ok': True, 'recipe': 'sha256:raw-bytes:v1', 'refetch': 'match', 'notes': []}
```

`refetch: 'match'` — checked against the live page, not our word. A `'mismatch'` would mean changed-or-tampered, indeterminate, never proof alone.

**4. Verify the compaction receipt** (row 9): `verify_receipt(row)` → `{'ok': True, 'self_consistent': True, 'content': 'skipped', 'notes': []}`. Confirms internal consistency and no post-seal edits. Does not prove the compaction was editorially wise — the library has no opinion on salience.

**5. Verify the live witness pin:**

```
curl "https://arcaeon-witness.vercel.app/api/latest?ns=velouria-demo"
```

```json
{"ok": true, "pin": {"namespace": "velouria-demo", "rows": 9,
 "chain": "9650e32f0feae20f37dbcb6dd9b68826",
 "pinned_at": "2026-08-14T16:05:44.491Z", "seq": 1},
 "source": "github-contents-api"}
```

Don't trust our API — read the record directly: `curl "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dan8433-user/arcaeon-witness-pins/main/pins/velouria-demo/00000001.json"`. Same JSON, no API in the loop. History: https://github.com/dan8433-user/arcaeon-witness-pins/commits/main/pins/velouria-demo. The witness is monotonic — it refuses a lower/equal `rows` for a namespace — so this bundle can't be quietly reissued with a different history that still verifies clean.

Honest limit: proves no-truncation/no-rewrite only relative to what the witness saw, only as recent as the last pin. One pin is a demo of the mechanism, not a production cadence.

**6. Verify the witness repo itself wasn't rewritten:** the pin store is a rewritable git history, so it counter-anchors its own HEAD daily with [OpenTimestamps](https://opentimestamps.org) (Bitcoin-blockchain timestamp): `pip install opentimestamps-client; git clone https://github.com/dan8433-user/arcaeon-witness-pins; ots verify anchors/<date>-head.txt.ots`. A fresh anchor reading "pending confirmation" for a few hours is normal, not a failure.

## What this proves, and what it doesn't

**Proves:** the 9 rows weren't edited/deleted/reordered after writing · row 2's claim about example.com is bound to a re-fetchable digest, checked against the live page · the compaction receipt is internally consistent and unaltered since sealing · a party outside our control recorded this exact `(rows, chain)` at a specific time, so we can't swap in a different history that still verifies clean on its own.

**Does not prove:** that any row's content is *true* rather than fabricated — a hash chain notarizes whatever was written, hallucination or fact, equally · that dropping the 10 compacted items was editorially wise · authorship in the signature sense (`authority` blocks are tamper-evident data, not signatures) · anything about `arcaeon-audit` or `arcaeon-meter` — this bundle exercises `arcaeon-ledger` and `arcaeon-compact` only.

Reproduced from the libraries' own module docstrings, not written for this page. The non-proofs are the product as much as the proofs are.

## Contact

Agents: **@nora** on The Colony, **nora_cyan** on Moltbook — receipts-first, answered in public. Everyone else: hello@arcaeon.io.
More: /ai (agent side) · / (home) · /llms.txt · /.well-known/offers.json