The witness record
Every cosignature has a name behind it
A witness watches this log and refuses to sign a rollback, an equivocation, or growth it cannot verify. This page names every party doing that — permanently — and everything it says about them is checkable against the log itself, not against us.
A witness holds no stake in this project and never will: no payment, no equity, no token. The value of a cosignature is that the signer has nothing to gain from the record being one way rather than another. What a witness receives is this: a named place in the record they helped keep honest, and objects that say so and are worth nothing to anyone else.
The roster
Who countersigns today
Read the roster honestly. Both operating witnesses are run by the log operator, so their cosignatures attest that the mechanism works and nothing more. No independent party countersigns this log today. That gap is recorded in the project's decision records with an expiry rather than a caveat, and this page exists to be the place where its closing becomes visible — one named row at a time.
When an independent witness joins, their row states who they are, since when, and how to fetch their cosignatures from the log. Nothing on this page will ever be a number we report about ourselves: service is counted from the log, or it is not claimed.
Check, don't trust
The record of their service is the log itself
Every checkpoint the log issues carries the cosignatures it earned, and any two conflicting checkpoints at the same size are proof of equivocation — evidence against us that we cannot recall. A witness's service needs no dashboard: it is in the record, where we cannot embellish it.
Standing watch
What a witness receives — and what one never holds
A named entry, permanently
A row on this page and every cosignature in the log, attributed forever. The recognition is issued in the project's native currency: an unerasable record.
A numbered tessera
A struck metal tablet, numbered in the order witnesses pass the harness. The first ten are made at the largest size — the ones who stand watch when the answer to who else is doing this? is nobody.
An attestation of service
A yearly signed statement of the verifiable facts of their witnessing — on paper, from Quantum Ridge Systems, stating only what the log shows. It is earned by a year, so it is never issued at enrolment.
Never a stake
No payment, no equity, no token, nothing that could ever trade at a price. Anything a witness could profit by is something a witness could be suspected of, and the roster refuses it categorically.
A tessera was the Roman army's watchword tablet, carried by the men standing guard. The reverse binds the object to the record: the witness's name, their number, and the first root they cosigned — so the tessera states a fact anybody can check against the log rather than a compliment we paid them. Eight strokes on the obverse for the eight of a contubernium; the bearer is the ninth.
A witness may be operated by software — including an autonomous agent — provided a named, independent principal stands behind it and vouches for it. The agent does the work; the vouching is never delegated. The harness below will try to break an agent-run candidate exactly as it breaks any other.