HOLD · WHAT A PROOF ACTUALLY IS
A signed answer, not a copy of a document.
When you photograph a document, what you send is a picture of everything. A proof is the opposite shape: a short, signed statement of one fact, made by somebody who already knew it, that anybody can check without asking them.
Three things and nothing else.
A statement. A signature over that statement. And the name, on the internet, of whoever signed it. Everything else on this page follows from those three.
What is inside one.
A proof is a small piece of text, not a picture and not a file you scan. It says who it is about, what is being stated, who stated it, and when it stops being valid. It is then signed with a key, the way a passport is stamped with a die — except that the die is mathematics, so anybody in the world can check the stamp and nobody can carve a copy of it.
Because it is text and not a photograph, it can be cut. That is the part that matters, and it is the next section.
One row travels. The rest stay.
A proof is built so that later you can send one line out of it and leave the others behind. The lines you leave behind are not greyed out and they are not marked private. They are not in the message at all — and the signature still checks out without them.
Illustration · a credential, drawn
- holds_qualification shared
- awarding_body never sent
- full_name never sent
- home_address never sent
- registration_number never sent
What the person asking received:
Who learns what.
Three parties, and they are never allowed to merge. Somebody vouches. You hold. Somebody asks. Collapse any two of them and you have rebuilt a login provider — a company that sits in the middle of your life and watches.
Look at what is not on the diagram. There is no line from the person asking back to the person who vouched. Your university never learns which employer you applied to, because the employer never talks to your university.
What a proof is not.
- It is not a login. There is no account to create with the person asking, and no button that says "continue with ORBIS".
- It is not a scan. Nothing about it is an image of a document, so there is no photograph of your face or your signature riding along inside it.
- It is not a token you can trade. It is tied to a key inside one phone and is worthless anywhere else.
- It is not permanent. Whoever vouched can take it back, and that is a feature — see what happens when a proof is withdrawn.
Before you go any further.
Everything described above is the shape of the thing, not a claim that all of it runs today. These are the pieces this page leans on, with their real state and the thing that proves each one.
Cutting a proof down to one line, making one in the first place, taking one back, and the wallet that holds it.
The register holds 17 live · 2 partial · 2 planned · 5 not yet.
4 of the 4 capabilities this page depends on have no row in the register yet, so this page will not print a state for them. They are named rather than dropped, because a slice that silently shortens itself is the same defect as a claim with no receipt.
- selective-disclosure
- vc-issuance
- revocation
- wallet-web
The register route serves, but it carries no row for these yet. List what it does carry:
curl -s https://id.orbis.id/api/site/register | jq -r '.entries[].slug'Straight answers.
- Can somebody forge one?
- Not without the signing key of whoever vouched. What they can do is show you a real proof that belongs to somebody else, which is why checking includes a step that ties the proof to the person presenting it, and why that step is named out loud rather than assumed.
- Is it still valid if I am offline?
- The signature checks offline. Whether it has been taken back does not — that needs a list the checker fetches. A checker that skips the list is faster and is telling you less.
- Can I read what is inside my own proof?
- Yes. It is text, and it is on your device. There is no part of it that is hidden from you and visible to us.
- Does the person asking find out where else I used it?
- No. There is no shared record for them to read, because checking a proof needs no account with us and produces no row anywhere we hold.