DEV UPDATE — From Photos to Verifiable Observations
Today we pushed forward a new layer of the MyZubster ecosystem: turning ordinary photographic records into structured, verifiable real-world observations.
Until now, photos were mostly media files. We are now building the infrastructure around them so that every observation can become a traceable piece of the ecosystem.
What we built today
We introduced the MyZubster Observation Registry, with data/observations.json acting as the structured source of truth for public observations.
The first dataset currently contains 10 published observations, including urban locations, landmarks, environmental services, sky observations and plants from Rimini.
Every one of these 10 media files now has its real SHA-256 hash recorded. This gives us a simple but important integrity primitive: the media associated with an observation can be checked against the registered fingerprint.
We also rebuilt the photo archive so it is no longer just a manually maintained gallery. photos.html now reads directly from the Observation Registry.
That means the architecture is moving toward:
photo → observation record → integrity hash → provenance → geographic context → bounty/payment evidence
We also created individual observation pages with an Integrity & Provenance section containing fields for:
observation ID and lifecycle status
media path
SHA-256
source
repository reference
geographic coordinates where known
bounty reference
Monero transaction reference
Missing information is deliberately left missing rather than guessed.
Two observations currently have geographic coordinates recorded, and we built a new Observation Explorer around them. The Explorer reads the same registry dynamically, provides search/category filtering, and includes a geographic map for observations with known coordinates.
The main MyZubster gateway now links directly to both the Photo Archive and Observation Explorer.
What comes next
The next phase is about provenance.
We want to progressively connect observations to the events that created them:
Observation ↔ Bounty ↔ Reward ↔ Monero transaction
The Monero wallet history is currently being synchronized so we can investigate historical bounty payments and associate transactions with the correct records. Wallet seeds, private keys and passwords will never belong in the public observation registry.
We also want to recover more original metadata where it genuinely exists. The VPS copies we inspected do not contain usable capture-time EXIF data, so captured_at remains empty instead of being fabricated.
Future work includes expanding GPS coverage, importing more observations, improving provenance states, connecting historical bounty records, and eventually making the verification process increasingly machine-readable.
The goal isn't simply to publish photographs.
It's to build a public trail showing what was observed, where it belongs, which media represents it, whether that media is unchanged, and eventually which ecosystem activity or bounty is connected to it.
We now have the first 10 records.
Next: connect the history.
MyZubster — observe, document, verify.
Top comments (0)