Anchor does not determine trustworthiness, issue trust judgments, calculate trust scores, or maintain trust relationships.
Within the Satoshium Suite, Attestor remains authoritative for Trust Statements. Anchor's role begins only when the integrity of a Trust Statement or other trust-related artifact should be preserved through an Integrity Reference.
Trust is a judgment or assessment made by a person, institution, community, system, or Attestor process.
Anchor does not make that judgment. Anchor may preserve the integrity of the artifact in which that judgment is expressed.
A Trust Statement is an Attestor-owned canonical object expressing a governed trust-related conclusion or assessment.
External AuthorityA trust-related artifact may include a Trust Statement, trust signal, assessment, recommendation, warning, confidence statement, or other governed representation.
FoundationAnchor should define the exact representation and Representation Boundary covered by the Integrity Reference before generating integrity material.
FoundationAnchor may preserve an Integrity Reference that allows later reviewers to determine whether the reviewed trust-related representation remains consistent with the representation originally anchored.
FoundationAttestor remains authoritative for the meaning, trust conclusion, lifecycle, Versioning, Correction, and publication of the Trust Statement.
Anchor may preserve integrity context for a defined Trust Statement representation without becoming the trust authority.
Integrity asks whether an artifact remains consistent with its anchored representation. Trust asks whether confidence should be placed in the subject, statement, source, or conclusion.
Anchor Integrity Verification may confirm consistency with an Integrity Reference. It does not determine whether the Trust Statement itself should be accepted.
Certification may inform trust, but Certifier remains authoritative for certification decisions. Anchor does not turn certification into a trust judgment.
Reputation may influence trust, but Anchor calculates neither. Anchor may preserve Integrity References for artifacts produced by systems that do.
Anchor preserves integrity context. It does not copy the trust logic or trust conclusion into Anchor-owned institutional authority.
A Trust Statement may retain perfect cryptographic integrity while remaining disputable, contextual, outdated, incomplete, or methodologically weak.
Anchor may confirm that the representation has not changed. It does not prove that the trust conclusion is correct.
A Trust Statement or other trust-related artifact may later be superseded, withdrawn, corrected, revoked, replaced, or reissued by its Source Institution.
Anchor should preserve the integrity lineage of the representation it actually anchored rather than silently rewriting the earlier state.
If Attestor or another Source Institution changes the trust judgment, Trust Statement, methodology, or lifecycle, that is a Source Artifact change.
If Anchor recorded the wrong Source Artifact, representation, digest, timestamp, signer metadata, or other Anchor-owned information, that may require an Anchor Correction.
A trust methodology, evaluation framework, scoring model, decision rule, or governance document may itself become an Anchor candidate.
In that case Anchor preserves the integrity of the methodology artifact. It does not adopt or endorse the methodology.
Trust-related artifacts may contain sensitive or evaluative information. Anchor should not amplify such information merely because it can be anchored.
The minimum-necessary-data principle should remain active.
These systems may inform one another while retaining separate authority.
Anchor should preserve the integrity of a trust-related artifact when that preservation has durable value, while leaving trust meaning, methodology, judgment, lifecycle, and publication to the institution responsible for them.