Humans & principals — read and verify a receipt
An agent acted in your name. Here is what you hold, and how to check it yourself.
What a receipt is
When a governed agent acts, the interaction leaves a receipt: a typed record of what was decided and done — the verb, the counterparty, the amounts, the rule that permitted it, and whether a human approved it. The receipt is content-hashed and the hash is sealed into a tamper-evident chain (GAA-REC-1): change one character of the record afterward and verification fails. What makes it different from a log line is exactly that property — a log asks you to trust its keeper; a receipt re-derives from the sealed record alone (GAA-REC-3), with no trust in the issuer required.
How to verify one
- Find the chain id on the receipt. It is a short printable identifier
(for example,
00ms0lp62r-7bfe02863a4583ce). - Call the named verify address. A conforming implementation names a public verify endpoint; verification is a read-only request — no key, no account, no login.
- Read the answer.
verified: truemeans the whole chain re-derives from its own content, entry by entry, ending in the record you hold.verified: falsenames the entry where re-derivation broke — treat the claim as unproven and ask the implementer why.
Try it now, on this site's own record. This is the seal of the specification revision you can read at /standard/r1/ — select the chain id and your browser makes the call:
00ms0lp62r-7bfe02863a4583ce
What a receipt is not
A verified receipt proves the record was not altered; it does not by itself make a simulated act real. GAA-REC-4 draws that line: a sealed simulated receipt is tamper-evident, not real — a labelled demonstration — until a named human gate clears (a funded rail, a licensed professional, counsel). An implementation that shows you a receipt owes you that label (GAA-POST-1 — it MUST NOT present demonstration or simulated results as production results).
A guided walkthrough
One implementer publishes a classroom that replays a real sealed day — step by step, with the hold on a consequential act and the receipts to verify at the end: the Trothward classroom. An honest label for it: it is a vendor's staged preview (Trothward is the founding team's implementation), named here as an informative example only — it is not part of the specification, and the specification does not require it.