The ring

Who watches whom, and what each of them has actually proved.

watches— trust. Different operators, independent logs. replicates— uptime. One operator, one key.

A tick on an arrow is the witness’s own conclusion, fetched from the node that drew it. What makes it worth anything is that you can recompute it without that node — select an edge and check it here, or read every byte on the evidence page.

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Select a node or an arrow.

Replication — a different thing entirely

Copies of one node, run by one operator, sharing one key and one log. They buy uptime. They prove nothing about each other, which is why they are drawn inside a boundary rather than joined by arrows: reading “three replicas agree” as “three parties verified” is precisely the wrong conclusion.

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