Every Trust Edge Is A Two-Way Conversation: Signed Once Against Checked Every Time
Summary
The verification half of the registry. A claim naming an authority should be checkable by going to that authority and asking — which is not a new requirement but the step that turns the self-declaration of upward trust into a signal. The fork the memo states in passing is the whole design: a signed assertion verified once and a live lookup checked every time are two products with opposite properties, not two settings. Only the live one can be metered, because charging per check requires observing every check — and what a live notary accumulates is a relationship graph that neither party handed over, which contradicts the estate's positioning more sharply than any content-handling service could. A notary that publishes rather than answers cannot meter and cannot surveil, and those turn out to be one property.
Key concepts
- Unreachable is a fourth state — a resolver rendering it as untrusted manufactures incidents; as trusted, it has no security property
- Metering and surveillance are one capability — removing one removes the other, so the privacy cost is a consequence of the revenue model
- Publish, don't answer — the same move as the published head, applied to verification
- A budget is a trust boundary — a resolver stopping because the next check cost too much is a new reason for a partial result
Key ideas
- The notary was specified in March as a countersignature naming its attester, with verification depth as a client-side setting.
- Issuance is better for the customer and worse for recurring revenue; a site arguing for honest disclosure should say which it chose.
- A resolution result must distinguish not-checked-because-unreachable from not-checked-because-it-cost-too-much.
- A third party's pricing decision quietly changes the assurance level of every verifier downstream.
On this site
Folded into the MVP pack as change-control entry C9; its published-answer shape is the same move the rules page now proposes for the reference.