A record that cannot be forked, a key that cannot vanish.
Four properties make a MIZAN answer safe to build into a payment path, a smart-contract gate or a mandate. None of them asks for trust: each is a rule a machine can hold us to.
A record continues only where it began. Nobody can fork a history.
Bound to its parent
Every extension of a record proves the same committed specification over a strictly longer window and binds the parent proof's digest in-circuit. A link that does not match its parent fails verification — there is no second timeline.
Anchored in time
The specification is committed and stamped into Bitcoin before the forward window begins. Bars proven after that anchor cannot have been written with hindsight — and a forward record can never be re-minted later, at any price.
Owned by its holder
Continuity binds the record, not the person: the holder can stop, leave or go public at any time. What nobody can do — holder, issuer or competitor — is continue the chain anywhere else or rewrite what it already says.
Pin our key. The next one is already promised.
Successor pre-committed
The next signing key already exists, offline. Only the sha256 of its public key is published — at /.well-known/mizan-keys.json under ceremony. At rotation, the new key must hash to that commitment, and a fresh successor hash is published in the same breath.
Never silent
Keys rotate only by this ceremony. A rotated key stays listed with its retirement date; a verifier that pinned today's key can accept tomorrow's without trusting the channel that delivered it.
Compromise plan
A compromised key is revoked by a statement signed with the successor key plus a leaf in the public verdict log — the same log every verdict lives in, Bitcoin-anchored, where one changed bit fails.
Proof is a heartbeat. Standing is continuous by definition.
Continuous
A credential in good standing keeps answering: the record extended within its staleness window, probes still responding where enrolled, revocation never triggered. Every check returns standing alongside the decision.
Lapsed, never erased
A record that stops is not deleted and not relabelled — history is history. But every check says standing lapsed until the record is extended, and a relying party's policy decides what that is worth.
Era law
Every credential verifies forever under the era that minted it, with its own pinned verifier. Upgrades never orphan a proof; supersession is public, never silent.
The live rules in one call: the check · the log head · the standard.