The Book. Each mark is one certified act of work, drawn from how it was made: rewrites loop back over themselves, pauses lift the pen, pasted text runs straight as a ruler, forgiven slips are tied off in gold, and faint threads show who recognized whom. Marks arrive in order and are never erased, and every new one turns the whole.

Merit

The output no longer proves the ability. A model can produce the essay, the code, the song. What it cannot produce is your history of making them.

Merit records how work was done, on your own device: corrections, revisions, pauses, pastes, timing. Never the words. You sign the record with a key only you hold, and its fingerprint is timestamped in Bitcoin so it can never be backdated. What you get is a certificate: evidence of a process, checkable by anyone, owned by you.

Verify, then inscribe

Drop a certificate here, together with its anchor proof (.ots) and a recognition (.recognition.json). Everything is checked in your browser first, and nothing leaves this page unless you inscribe.

or choose files

What it takes to enter

The Book admits work, not traffic. A certificate is inscribed only when all three hold, and the server checks each one again:

Real work. At least 250 characters, mostly typed rather than pasted.
Anchored. Its timestamp is confirmed in a Bitcoin block, not just submitted. That takes a few hours after you sign, and it means nothing here was backdated.
Recognized. Someone already in the Book signs that they recognize it (merit recognize cert.json). Each person can recognize three certificates every thirty days. Every recognition is public and drawn as a thread from the recognizer's mark to the new one, so the Book shows who brought whom.

The first recognizer is the author of the paper; their threads run from Mark 0 at the center.

What this is

A certificate proves who signed a record of a session and that every number in it follows from a committed log. It is evidence of process, not proof of authorship. Its strength is cumulative: more sessions, more ways of capturing them, more people who recognize the work.

Slips you correct and move past count in your favor. Slips you leave are part of your signature, never a penalty. Nothing is ever deleted: a correction points to what it corrects. A record that can be reset to look clean carries no information.

The Book is a public register of certificates whose authors chose to inscribe them. Each mark changes the state of the whole: the drawing's turn is read from the latest link of a chain that runs back to Mark 0, the paper itself. Your browser re-reads the chain from the beginning every time this page loads.

The recorder, the verifier and the specification are being released as open source under Apache-2.0. The release will be announced at Department of Jazz. Read the paper.