Proof of Place: what a satellite can and cannot prove
Tokenised real estate, carbon plots, insured warehouses, leased equipment — the same question keeps coming back in a different costume: was the thing actually there, then, in that state? Not "does the issuer say so". Was it there.
Satellite imagery is the first answer everybody reaches for, and it is a good answer for about a third of the cases. This is a map of which third, written from the side that has to hand the report to a client.
The four layers, weakest to strongest
Every "proof of place" product is some combination of these, and the honest ones say which layers they checked and which they could not.
| Layer | What it checks | What it still misses |
|---|---|---|
| File integrity | hash, re-saves, edit history, metadata consistency | a photo taken elsewhere and re-wrapped |
| Time | capture time vs the claim, file timestamps, frame order | a wrong device clock |
| Place, declared | GPS/EXIF against the described site | GPS is forgeable by design |
| Place, visual | landmarks, skyline, signage, terrain, shadows and sun angle for the date | a convincing reconstruction |
| Independent capture | someone we hire stands there and shoots | only as good as that person's honesty |
Note the direction: each layer costs more and proves more, and none of them proves ownership. Who owns a site is a registry question. A photograph cannot answer it, and a product that blurs the two is selling the wrong thing.
What a satellite actually gives you
Three real advantages, and they are not small:
- Independence. The image is not produced by the party making the claim. That is the whole point. A satellite pass is a third party looking, and neither the issuer nor the auditor controls what it saw.
- Retrospective. Archive imagery lets you check a claim about the past. If someone says the site was cleared in March, an April pass is evidence about March that nobody could have staged later.
- A date you did not choose. Tasking gives you a capture in a window — usually 24 to 72 hours for a commercial optical satellite — and the timestamp is the vendor's, not the client's.
What it cannot do, in the order people get burned
It looks from above. A roof, a yard, an empty field, a foundation, a row of containers. Interiors, basements, stock levels under a canopy, the condition of anything indoors: outside the view. Half of the warehouse claims I get asked about are interior claims.
Optical means weather. Cloud cover is not an edge case, it is a schedule. A site in monsoon season can go weeks without a usable optical pass. SAR solves cloud and gives you structure rather than a photograph — and then you need someone who can read SAR, which is a different skill and a different price.
Resolution sets the question, not the answer. At tens of centimetres you can tell a truck from a container. You cannot tell one container from another. So "the asset is there" resolves only as far as "something of that shape and size is there". If the claim is "container MSKU-1234567 is there", the satellite does not close it.
A pass is a moment. One image on the 14th says nothing about the 1st through the 13th. Claims about continuous presence need a stream, and a stream is a subscription, not a report.
Tasking costs hundreds, not tens. A tasked scene from a commercial provider is a real line item. Any product that quotes you a $50 "satellite verification" is either using stale archive, or using nothing.
The cheap check almost nobody runs: shadows
This is the part I would put in every report if clients did not find it strange.
A photo claims a date, a time and a place. The sun has exactly one position for that triple. So the azimuth of every shadow in the frame — and its length relative to the object that cast it — must agree with the sun's position at those coordinates at that moment.
It costs nothing to compute and it catches the most common forgery: a real photo of the right place, taken on a different day, relabelled.
It also fails honestly, and you have to know when: overcast light with no distinct shadow, indoor shots, wide-angle distortion near the frame edge, and an unknown time zone. When it cannot be applied, the report says "sun angle: not applicable, reason", not "sun angle: pass".
Why "independent capture" is the strongest tier and the weakest claim
If the photos are not the client's, they are not the client's story.
And then the honest sentence: this tier is only as good as the operator. It removes the client from the chain of custody, it does not remove human incentives from the world. What you can do is make the operator's contribution visible and attributable — named, paid directly, capture metadata preserved — so that a dispute has a person to examine rather than an anonymous upload.
Do not average the layers into a score
The temptation is a single number: confidence 0.87. Resist it. A score lets a report hide a disagreement, and the disagreements are the product.
If the GPS says one site and the landmarks say another, the report states both and says they disagree. If the satellite shows a cleared yard and the client's photos show stock, the report says which is which and when each was captured. Averaging those into 0.6 throws away the only thing the client is paying for: a named reason to go look.
The same principle shows up in reserve reporting, where a ratio computed over half a reserve is refused rather than printed with a footnote. A number that survives only with a caveat is not a number.
What this product is, said plainly
A report on photos you send: $300, three working days, per layer verdict plus the gaps. With independent capture — a hired operator, or a satellite pass in a 24–72 hour window — Pricing is not set yet: the idea is still being shaped. Continuous checking on one site: **a monthly option (price to be set), cancel by not paying.
And the boundaries, on the page, next to the price:
- not proof of ownership;
- GPS coordinates are forgeable, and metadata is never sold as proof;
- satellites see from above only;
- not a legal opinion, not an appraisal.
The test of a verification report is not whether it says yes. It is whether it can come back no and still be worth the money. A report that can only confirm is a receipt for optimism.
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