The problem Proof of Reality solves

AI can fake any photo in five seconds. That broke something basic: looking at a picture used to mean the thing was real. Now it doesn't.

A lot of things depend on that:

• Used-car and used-goods sites are full of fake photos. People fly across countries to inspect cars that turn out to be nothing like the ad.
• Insurance claims rely on before/after pictures. Anyone with a laptop can make those.
• Tokens that represent a real-world asset ("this NFT is a watch in a vault") have no way to prove the watch is still there.
• Smart contracts that care about the real world (parametric insurance, supply-chain triggers, DePIN sensors) have to trust one central data source.
• Provenance for art, wine, watches is paperwork. Paper can be forged.

What we built

A 30-second scan from an iPhone or an industrial camera, tied to a random number that came from a satellite seconds before, signed by a chip inside the device, and minted as an NFT on Base. Five separate signatures get checked on every scan. To fake one, you'd have to fake all five at once, and one of them comes from space.

What people can use it for

Online marketplaces. A listing with a Reality NFT was scanned right before posting, on real hardware, with a satellite timestamp on it. Listings without one start to look suspicious by default.

Rentals and insurance. Scan the car when you hand over the keys. Scan it when you get them back. Both scans are on-chain. There's nothing to argue about.

Tokenized real-world assets. A watch in a vault gets re-scanned every week by a camera with a hardware signer. The token now points at a real watch, not a PDF promising a watch.

Provenance for valuables. Every time a painting changes hands, a fresh scan goes on-chain. The history is cryptographic, not a folder of certificates.

Smart contracts that care about physical things. Any contract can ask "is this thing actually there, right now?" and get back a real proof.

Theft and warranty. A bicycle, a power tool, a server in a data center all get a hardware identity. Stolen things stay traceable. Warranty fights have an answer.

Why it matters

Today, the proof that a physical thing exists is a photograph. Photographs broke. We're building a replacement that uses cryptography instead.

Challenges we ran into

While integrating with SpaceComputer's gotee_starter, one line in scripts/armory-link.sh silently hung on Linux but worked fine on my Mac: ping -c 2 -W 2000 "$GATEWAY".

No output, no error, no timeout. We assumed it was something else: a routing issue, the SpaceComputer Armory not booted yet, a set -e interaction, the case "$OS" block picking the wrong branch. Then we lined up the man pages. On macOS (BSD ping), -W is in milliseconds, so 2000 = 2 seconds. On Linux (iputils ping), -W is in seconds, so 2000 ≈ 33 minutes. The script wasn't frozen, it was waiting half an hour for a host that hadn't finished booting.

Fix: set PING_W per OS inside the case "$OS" branch (2000 on macOS, 2 on Linux), then use $PING_W in the shared ping call.

Lesson: when a shared command behaves differently across OSes, the answer is usually in the man pages, not the script. Always diff flags with units before assuming they mean the same thing.

PR to SpaceComputer: https://github.com/spacecomputer-io/gotee_starter/pull/5