The ledger of record is the set of all cryptographically signed feeds of on-chain data. It subsumes social media feeds, data APIs, event streams, newsletters, RSS. It'll take years to build, but will ultimately become the decentralized layer of facts that underpins all narrative.

Think of the ledger of record as a decentralized wire service. Every person & organization slowly moves from posting to centralized social media platforms to posting to decentralized protocols. The latter have monetization, permissions, distribution, and programmability built in.

Here’s another figure from @chainlink.


For example, the Weather Channel posts cryptographically signed feeds of weather data. Redfin posts real estate transactions. Foursquare posts location data. And they can make them free to all, or put them behind a crypto paywall.

Right now each crypto oracle in the ledger of record can credibly establish at least three kinds of metadata:

- who (digital signature)
- what (hash)
- when (timestamp)

The simplest example is a Bitcoin transaction: we know who sent what when, with high probability.

To understand the ledger of record, you need to understand:

- digital signatures
- hash functions
- blockchain timestamps
- Nakamoto consensus
- Merkle trees
- crypto oracles

Every new proof-of-X (like proof-of-location) expands the scope of what the ledger of record can prove.

The ledger of record is subsidized by prediction markets. Inverting the logic of futarchy, we’re agnostic on whether prediction markets will actually predict the future; they may simply net out to being horse-race style bets. But they do subsidize the creation of a verified past.

Block explorers are a high-traffic example of a subset of the ledger of record, namely the set of all Bitcoin and Ethereum events. But if you look at what’s going on with crypto oracles and prediction markets (Chainlink, Augur, Kleros, etc), you get a sense of what is coming.

Talking about the ledger of record in 2020 is a bit like talking about rich web apps in 2000. We need to dramatically scale on-chain capacity to build it. But fortunately some of the smartest people in the world are working on that. https://twitter.com/devinawalsh/status/1186305859137224710

"In theosophy and anthroposophy, the Akashic Chronicle is a compendium of all human events, thoughts, words, emotions, and intent ever to have occurred in the past, present, or future."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akashic_records