Provenance for Autonomous Actions

Provenance is the verifiable record of what an autonomous system did, in what order, and on whose authority. For agents it means every consequential action leaves an append-only, tamper-evident entry — a signed receipt and a ledger event — so the history can be replayed and checked rather than taken on faith. Provenance is what turns "the agent said it did this" into "here is the proof it did."

Records

What happened, in order, by whose authority

Shape

Append-only, hash-chained, tamper-evident

Artifact

Signed receipt + ledger entry

Balances

Derived, never asserted

Append-only, derived, deterministic

A ledger for autonomous action is append-only: a correction is a new entry, never an edit, so history cannot be quietly rewritten. Balances are derived from entries rather than stored, amounts are integer minor units to avoid floating-point money, and writes are idempotent so a retry cannot double-count. These are the properties that let a stranger audit the record without trusting its author.

A derived figure may never be asserted — a number a caller could write is a number a caller could forge. That single rule, applied across receipts, balances and proofs, is what makes the record worth anything to a counterparty.