Verifiable knowledge
Verifiable knowledge means every change to your vault is signed and permanent — you can prove what you knew, when you knew it, and what changed since.
A normal notes app remembers the present. Altretta remembers the proof. Underneath your Markdown files runs a tamper-evident action history: changes are recorded as hash-linked, Ed25519-signed actions in a DAG (a directed acyclic graph). Nothing is silently overwritten, and knowledge that goes away is retracted with a signed action rather than erased — so your history isn't just a convenience, it's evidence.
The 証 seal is Altretta's verification mark. Wherever you see it, the content behind it can be checked against a signed record — not just trusted, but verified.
Why this is different
Most tools give you a version history you have to take on faith:
- Obsidian has no built-in history or provenance at all — once you save over a note, the previous state is gone unless you kept a manual backup.
- Logseq offers Git auto-commit. That's better than nothing, but Git history is mutable and unsigned: anyone can
rebase,commit --amend, or force-push to rewrite what "happened." You can't prove a commit wasn't edited after the fact.
Altretta's history is append-only and cryptographically signed. You can't quietly rewrite the past, because every action is chained to the one before it by hash and signed with your key. Tamper with any link and the chain no longer verifies.
This is a signed action log with provenance — think distributed-ledger-style integrity, not a blockchain. There's no coin, no mining, and no network required. It runs locally, on your machine, over your own files.
What you can do with it
Signed history (the DAG)
How a change becomes a hash-linked, signed action — and what happens to knowledge you remove.
Provenance & proofs
Every cited passage and grounded AI answer carries a verifiable provenance anchor. Inspect and verify it in the Proof Inspector.
Time-travel: history, diff & restore
Browse a note's snapshot history, see exactly what changed in a diff view, and restore any earlier version.
The audit trail
A user-facing record of every change across your vault — who did what, when, and provably.
When it matters
- Prove what your AI saw. When a grounded answer cites a passage, the citation carries a signed provenance anchor. You can show, later, exactly which version of which note the model read.
- Prove what changed. Time-travel is backed by the signed DAG, not loose file backups — so a diff isn't just "what my editor thinks changed," it's a verifiable record.
- Trust a removal. Deleting a note moves it to the vault's own
.trash/folder rather than destroying it, and the facts it contributed are retracted with signed actions rather than vanishing. An accidental deletion is recoverable and the retraction is accountable. - Anchor your work in time. For research, compliance, disputes, or your own peace of mind, you can demonstrate the state of your knowledge at a point in the past.
Everything here works with no configuration. The signed history is always on — you don't have to remember to commit, snapshot, or back up.
Two honest limits. Note versions are capped, so time-travel reaches back a bounded number of versions, not forever — see Time-travel. And a connected AI granted write access has tools that genuinely delete graph facts or prune history; they are refused under the default read-only access level, which is one reason to leave it there. See the MCP tool reference.
Start with Signed history (the DAG) to see how it works.
Related
AI you can trust
The grounded AI whose every citation this signed history makes provable.
Grounded, cited answers
Where the signed provenance anchor shows up: behind every AI citation.
The semantic graph
The graph these signed actions are recorded against.
Verify a published site
Take the same 証 verification public — prove a published page against its signed source.
Team encryption
How signed, verifiable history holds up when a vault is shared and encrypted.
Glossary
DAG, hash-link, Ed25519, tombstone, provenance — defined.