Glossary
Glossary
Every witness-network term, in one line each.
| Term | Means |
|---|---|
| Anchor | One signed tuple — {head, count, cumulative, as_of} — submitted to witnesses. The only thing a witness ever sees. |
| Chain | One agent's spend history, identified by a seed id. |
| Seed id | The stable identifier of a chain, derived from the public delegation. Used to read a witness: GET /v1/anchor/{seed}. |
| Head | The commitment to the whole private log at a point in time. Reveals nothing about its contents. |
| Witness | A node that co-signs monotone growth and logs what it accepted. Sees aggregates only. |
| Member key | A witness's public signing key, printed at first boot. What principals put in their declared set. |
| Witness set (𝒲) | N named members plus a threshold t, committed by a content hash carried inside every anchor. |
Threshold (t) | How many cosignatures finalize an anchor. t must collude to lie; N − t + 1 down blocks anchoring. |
| Finalized anchor | An anchor carrying ≥ t distinct cosignatures from the declared set, each with a log-inclusion proof. |
| Cosignature | A witness's signature over an anchor it accepted. |
| Inclusion proof | Evidence that a witness put the anchor in its append-only log, rooted in a signed checkpoint. |
| Duplicity proof | Both signed tuples for one (chain, index) — a portable, offline-verifiable contradiction. |
| Equivocation | Showing two verifiers two different histories. What a duplicity proof catches. |
| Withholding | Serving a truncated history so recent records "don't exist". What freshness catches. |
| Freshness | A labeled result — fresh, stale, unanchored — reported beside the verdicts, never inside them. |
| Stale | A finalized anchor exists ahead of the history you were given. Not tampering — tampering fails outright. |
| Unanchored | No anchor reachable. Freshness unknown, which is never the same as fresh. |
| Watcher | Anyone reading many witness logs and comparing them. The market is one. |
| Anchor store | The node's durable record of the last anchor co-signed per chain — its anti-equivocation memory. |
| Roles | anchor (spend anchors), kel (key-history receipts), cosign (log checkpoints). One node serves any combination. |
| Registry copy | The node's local copy of parties' public identity events, used to resolve submitters' current keys. |
| Conformance vectors | The published, implementation-neutral test suite that defines what a witness must do. |