Countersignatures

What a countersignature is

Only the third column is doing any work, and it says the same thing three times: none of these states is ours to change. A claim we make about ourselves — which agent we run, which format we emit — is countersigned the moment it is written, because we are both parties to it. Those are excluded here. What is counted is only what crosses a boundary, which is the only kind of claim a signature could add anything to.

gda-group · 17

flashy-group · 10

flashyos · 1

How this is counted

A survey reads every repository in the estate at its default branch — never a working copy — and folds out the edges whose type crosses an organisational boundary. Which types those are is read from the shared edge vocabulary rather than listed here, so it cannot fall behind the specification. A repository whose record could not be read is named as unread rather than counted as a zero.

Nothing is held back from this page: every cross-boundary claim in the estate is published, so the count above is the whole set. Were a private claim ever made — an ownership stake, say — it would be filtered before the survey counted it, and this line would say how many, and nothing else about them.

The as-of date is when the estate’s record was surveyed, and this page does not ask to be believed on it. Every row names the repository and the ref it came from; the records are public, append-only, and verifiable offline. The ledger has its own proof →