Trust Systems

charm.farm When I first wrote about charm.farm in 2023, the charm was a self-contained HTML document: a 256×256 bitmap, a 60-token caption, and a chain of JSON Web Tokens embedded in <meta> tags. Provenance lived inside the file. Transfer the file, transfer the record. Remove the tokens and you had destroyed the object’s history — it lost its charm. That experiment was useful, but it was still entirely digital. The charms were portable, but they were also infinitely copyable in the ordinary sense: duplicate the bytes, duplicate the artifact. What I wanted next was harder. I wanted a painting on a wall to carry the same kind of verifiable lineage, and I wanted the digital image of that painting to be bound to the physical object in a way that could be checked by anyone with a phone — without minting, without a marketplace, without a blockchain, and without asking anyone to trust my database. Trust Systems is the software infrastructure for that binding. It is a desktop application…