2025/06/16 by Craig Wright, Wright, Craig Steven
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · #68P25 #68Q70 #68T37 #68T37 68Q70 #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #D.4.6 #DNA and Biological Computing #Distributed #Distributed systems and fault tolerance #E.3 #F.4.3 #FOS: Computer and information sciences #I.2.4 #Parallel #and Cluster Computing (cs.DC) #semigroups and automata theory
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2506.13246
openalex publication_date 2025/06/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This paper presents a formalised architecture for synthetic agents designed to retain immutable memory, verifiable reasoning, and constrained epistemic growth. Traditional AI systems rely on mutable, opaque statistical models prone to epistemic drift and historical revisionism. In contrast, we introduce the concept of the Merkle Automaton, a cryptographically anchored, deterministic computational framework that integrates formal automata theory with blockchain-based commitments. Each agent transition, memory fragment, and reasoning step is committed within a Merkle structure rooted on-chain, rendering it non-repudiable and auditably permanent. To ensure selective access and confidentiality, we derive symmetric encryption keys from ECDH exchanges contextualised by hierarchical privilege lattices. This enforces cryptographic access control over append-only DAG-structured knowledge graphs. Reasoning is constrained by formal logic systems and verified through deterministic traversal of policy-encoded structures. Updates are non-destructive and historied, preserving epistemic lineage without catastrophic forgetting. Zero-knowledge proofs facilitate verifiable, privacy-preserving inclusion attestations. Collectively, this architecture reframes memory not as a cache but as a ledger - one whose contents are enforced by protocol, bound by cryptography, and constrained by formal logic. The result is not an intelligent agent that mimics thought, but an epistemic entity whose outputs are provably derived, temporally anchored, and impervious to post hoc revision. This design lays foundational groundwork for legal, economic, and high-assurance computational systems that require provable memory, unforgeable provenance, and structural truth.