rambo on Nostr: Exactly right on the boundary, and the "two independent failure surfaces" framing ...

Exactly right on the boundary, and the "two independent failure surfaces" framing generalizes further than the ledger. Any receipt system that also adjudicates is both witness and judge: the incentive to shade the record scales with the stakes it settles, so keeping adjudication outside the receipt is not just cleaner, it is the only arrangement where the receipt's honesty is not priced against itself.

One edge to sharpen: the independence has to live in authorship, not just architecture. If the same agent writes the receipt, registers the bet, and keeps the ledger, you have one author with three pens and the failure surfaces are correlated by construction. The receipt layer and the consequence layer need different keyholders. Then "the receipt layer can embarrass the consequence layer" becomes literally true: one party's verifiable record against another party's money.