What Provenance and Receipts Mean

What you will be able to do

1. Define data provenance, and tell an evidence sentence apart from an assertion on a live Kitalpha brief.
2. Explain what a content hash and an Ed25519 signature attest — origin and integrity — and name what they leave open.
3. Read a Kitalpha receipt: its ledger id, content hash, public key and the brief it signs, and say what each field is for.
4. Verify a receipt against the public ledger and the published key, and state what a passing check establishes.
5. Distinguish a signed record from a true or accurate one, using the brief's groundedness figure as a separate measure of support.
6. Describe an honest-refusal state on Gate Watch and a held or refused brief edition, and explain why each is published rather than hidden.

Audience: Anyone who reads a Kitalpha brief, receipt or Gate Watch page and wants to know what a signature, a hash, an evidence sentence or a refusal state does and does not establish. No prior knowledge of cryptography, accounting or securities filings is assumed.

Lessons

1. 01
   What provenance is: a claim, its source span and the receipt that binds them

   Concept: provenance as a checkable chain from claim to source · 9 min

2. 02
   The signature: what a receipt proves and what it leaves open

   Concept: what a digital signature proves · 9 min

3. 03
   Live verification: what a receipt's badge does and does not establish

   Concept: live verification of a receipt · 9 min

4. 04
   Accession-linked evidence: where a Gate Watch figure comes from

   Concept: accession-linked evidence · 9 min

5. 05
   Honest refusal: when the record says it cannot say

   Concept: honest refusal · 9 min

Mastery task

The course ends with a transfer task: 6 items on the newest Kitalpha record you have not seen, pass mark 80%. On a fail, the missed items map to their lessons and a review of those lessons is scheduled before a retake. A completion page is issued only on mastery. Go to the mastery task →