Definitions

• Def. I — The Verifier. The on-chain program. Its sole native faculty is signature-checking against a known public key, together with deterministic recomputation of its own state (program-derived addresses, account bytes). It has no clock but the chain’s, no senses, no network.

• Def. II — The Agent. An off-chain entity (a program, a server, a person with a script) that performs deeds in the world and wishes the Verifier to act upon one of them.

• Def. III — A Behaviour B. A function from a state of the world to an output: B : World → Output. Our running example is B_dns(world) = ("owns", domain, k) iff the live DNS of world binds _solana.authority.<domain> to k. Note well: B is not pure. Its value depends on external state the Verifier cannot see.

• Def. IV — The Terminal Fact. The external fact upon which a behaviour’s output depends — here, the actual content of the world’s DNS at an instant, from a vantage. Every behaviour that reaches outside pure computation terminates in a fact.

• Def. V — A Witness. A datum w that lets the Verifier check a fact by its native faculty — i.e., a signature (or chain of signatures) over the fact, verifiable against a key the Verifier already trusts. A fact carries a witness when such a w exists.

• Def. VI — Capability vs. Exercise. To have the capability for B is to be able to produce B’s output on demand. To have faithfully exercised B is to have actually produced a particular true output. These are different claims and, we shall see, admit different proofs.

• Def. VII — Attestation. A signature by a third party (hardware vendor, quorum, notary) asserting something the Verifier cannot itself observe — e.g., “the code running here measures to hash H,” or “we, the jury, observed the fact.” Attestation relocates trust; it does not abolish it.

• Def. VIII — A Bond. Value the Agent stakes, forfeit upon a public proof of its misbehaviour. A bond converts an unprovable promise into a falsifiable and costly one.

• Def. IX — A Constitution. A machine-checkable specification of an Agent’s intended behaviour, published and cryptographically bound to the Agent’s identity, against which the Agent may later be judged.

• Def. X — The Blast Radius. The set of powers a compromised key confers. Today the postmaster key’s blast radius is the entire network (authorize + deactivate + sweep + retune). Shrinking it is the practical prize.