An open protocol for public trust and accountability on the web
The internet made information cheap to publish and distribute. That was a real gain.
But it also made signals much cheaper to fake. Spam emails, fake reviews, bot accounts, synthetic content, and scam domains now litter the web. In this environment, the question becomes:
What should be trusted?
Today there is no public evidence layer that can answer this question. If there were, email clients, web browsers, smartphones, forums, search engines, and social platforms could consult this record to filter spam, warn against dangerous domains, and protect users against harm.
Chronicle creates a public record of costly trust signals.
And no, it is not a new blockchain.
The idea is simple: anyone can publish an orientation event that points toward or away from a specific subject, such as a website, email address, phone number, account, message, or prior Chronicle event.
Here is Bob orienting against scam.shop:
["web:domain", "scam.shop", -1000, "bob_pub", 1731088810123, "bob_sig"]To avoid becoming another cheap signal, publishing an event requires sacrificing a chosen amount of monetary value. In this case, Bob sacrifices 1000 millisatoshis of Bitcoin.
Similar to OpenTimestamps, the chain is used only for anchoring. Chronicle events live off-chain.
The data is public and can be used by email clients, web browsers, forums, wallets, search engines, and social platforms to compute trust, filter spam, rank content, and warn against dangerous domains.
See:
- Whitepaper for the technical and conceptual overview
- Protocol specification for clients and nodes
- Event registry for initial event kinds
The PageRank intuition
Chronicle works in two ways:
1. It attaches cost to orientation.
2. It makes actors recursively accountable for orientation.
Both can be understood through the intuition behind Google's PageRank.
A link from one page to another was a small act of orientation: one page pointing to another as relevant or important. A page became important when many pages linked to it, or when a few already-important pages linked to it. Importance flowed recursively through the graph.
Chronicle generalizes that structure.
A link is replaced by a signed, costly orientation event. The event can point toward or away from a subject. That subject can be a website, email address, phone number, account, message, prior Chronicle event, or another canonical digital object.
Because events are public, actors become accountable for what they signal. Because events are costly, they are harder to spam. Because events can point to prior events, the graph can judge not only actors, but specific acts of judgment.
Clients do not have to treat all events equally. An orientation from a credible actor can carry more weight than an orientation from an unknown or low-reputation actor. And credibility itself can be computed recursively from how others have oriented toward that actor and their past events.
This means good actors can inherit weight from the credible graph around them and become influential without personally being wealthy.
By contrast, a wealthy attacker is limited if their support comes only from an isolated cluster of fake or low-reputation accounts.
The web's link structure was implicit, ambiguous, and cheap to manipulate. A link could mean endorsement, criticism, citation, humor, or spam.
Chronicle makes orientation explicit: toward or away, signed, costly, and accountable.
Clients can then compute trust and reputation from the public graph.
See this essay for a deeper analysis of Chronicle as a system of costly orientation and recursive accountability.