Six decisions that are not revisited.
They cost more than any piece of functionality, because the right to call something evidence rests entirely on them. Each one forbids something convenient.
Honest time
Observation is separated from delivery, and cache is always labelled as cache. We never present old state as fresh state, even when that would be convenient for everyone involved.
Rights travel with the data
Every object knows what may be done with it. Where the source is silent, the reading is conservative rather than convenient.
Verification without us
The verifier is open, the format is published, the issuance log is public. Trust that requires permission to verify is not trust.
No circumvention
Technical protections are not defeated. A closed target is a closed target, not a challenge.
Identifiable
Our requests can be recognised and we can be contacted. Anonymity is incompatible with responsibility.
Everyone's hands are tied, including ours
We cannot issue a passport with a backdated time either. An evidence system whose operator can forge the past is worth nothing.
Honest time forbids the convenient optimisations — serving cache as fresh, merging two observations into one. That is precisely why it is hard to copy: a competitor growing on integration speed will not tie its own hands.
Nine words.
If, after everything else, these read as obvious, the writing worked.
A state of the external world obtained by a machine for a decision or an action.
A signed record of a fact's provenance: six field groups and a signature.
Actually obtaining state from the world, as distinct from serving it from cache.
The moment of observation, separated from the moment of delivery. The core of everything.
What may be done with the fact next. Travels with the data.
The open tool that checks the signature. Works without us.
A public list of passport hashes that makes backdating detectable.
All costs divided by the number of useful results.
The right to trust a machine with a decision a human answers for. This is what is sold.