Soundness Without Leverage: What Survives of Verification after Parity

Abstract

Beyond the parity threshold, the framework this paper belongs to has closed the channels through which a weaker party might still direct a stronger system. Containment dissolves, deference expires, no uptake form holds between evidence and standing, and the coupling's normative anchor yields standing without grip. This paper asks what the same crossing does to verification, and answers with its own split. The verification asymmetry carries two senses, and the corpus's published sentences compress them. As a task property, checking a supplied certificate is easier than finding one; that sense carries no capability index and survives the crossing. As audit leverage, the asymmetry underwrote a supervisory audit of an acting system; that sense is regime-bound and does not survive. Parity takes the leverage and leaves the soundness. In the proof-object operating mode, soundness also survives in deployed form, free of producer-capacity and cryptographic-hardness assumptions, subject to the stated trust base; the succinct tier's guarantee does not survive the crossing. On soundness alone, however, nothing stands: no safety architecture, and no working layer either. What the paper specifies is a candidate transactional hygiene layer, conditional on conjectural participation and on a bottleneck that persists. What that layer contains: artefact-local guarantees relative to a model, specifications that age, coverage composed by the adversary, demand financed by rents with documented expiry clocks, and an unmitigated selection effect. The demand the corpus itself attests runs inbound, on its source's own conditionals; the peer-to-peer half is imported substrate under its full mortgage, not attested demand; the human-facing cell is conjectural. The spec space holds two instantiated families with deployed anchors, one that narrows, two constructions with open wounds, and three named failures; specification adequacy and coverage close nowhere. The pre-parity content is an option list with measured cost anchors, under use-conditions the paper prices as open. The paper states what the layer cannot do before what it could, and it keeps both halves.