Artifact — specification (placeholder)
The artifact track stays quiet until Q2 week 24. By then, hash functions, Merkle trees, and HMAC live in your hands; the specification can name a concrete mathematical defense for a concrete journalism use case. Hesitation Media's Trustless Journalism Protocol already hashes sources via the /archive skill — the question is what the cryptographic surface around that protocol should be.
Quest Draft the artifact specification: what does the journalism component need to do, who attacks it, and what mathematics defends it?
Load-bearing idea
An artifact specification has three layers: a concrete journalism use case (this is the thing humans want), a threat model (who attacks it, how, with what resources), and a cryptographic argument (which primitives, why those, with what assumed hardness). Most failed crypto projects skip the second layer and end up with mathematics that defends the wrong thing.
For Hesitation Media, the use case is source-archival integrity over time, surviving the loss of the journalist, the publisher, or the index. Adversaries include state-level actors (store-now-decrypt-later), hostile editorial pressure (forced redaction), and ordinary infrastructure failure. The cryptographic argument has to handle all three.
Retrieval prompts
- (To be written when the spec is drafted in week 24.)
Re-derivation log
Week 24 entry point. By then this file will be replaced or expanded; the placeholder exists so the artifact track is visible on the atlas from day one.