principles, not promises.

Claims are permanent once admitted to the ledger.

A submission is checked for admissibility against the Claim Standards before it becomes part of the ledger. A submission that does not meet those standards is rejected before admission — because it never entered the ledger, no historical record has been altered or deleted.

Once admitted, a claim is permanent. Its original text, timestamp, and attribution can never be edited, reworded, or deleted — not by the claimant, not by an administrator, not by the founder. If a problem with an admitted claim is discovered later, TAIL may append an administrative status to the record, but the original entry is never replaced or erased.

The ledger grows. It never rewrites.

Identity establishes accountability.

A claim carries weight because a real, identifiable person put their name on it. Anonymity and accountability are incompatible; a ledger of disposable identities is just another comment section. Verification levels exist so that identity can be established — and displayed — in proportion to what a claim asks the world to believe.

TAIL protects contact information, never the accountability record.

Email addresses and identity documents stay private. Display name, verification level, full claim history, and accuracy record are public — always. Those are two different things, and TAIL will never confuse them.

Every claim declares its origin.

A claim made by a person about themselves is not the same as a claim recorded from a public statement, submitted by a third party, or observed by the community. The origin is declared at submission and is immutable thereafter. TAIL never blurs "the person said this" with "someone says the person said this."

Every claim also distinguishes who it concerns from who recorded it. The person a claim is about is not necessarily the person who staked it. Attribution records who the claim concerns. Reputation records what a verified person chose to stand behind.

Every claim declares how reality will resolve it — before the outcome arrives.

An election. A filing. An earnings report. A study. A court decision. Time. The resolution event is named at submission, so no one can move the goalposts after the fact. TAIL should know how a claim will be evaluated before the world knows the answer.

Every claim must be objectively resolvable: capable of eventual determination from evidence or observable events. Statements and predictions resolve TRUE or FALSE. Commitments resolve FULFILLED or NOT FULFILLED.

A claim must also be specific enough that its resolution conditions can be applied consistently. A claim that is technically resolvable in principle but too vague to evaluate consistently — "things will get much better soon" — does not meet this standard, and is not admitted to the ledger.

Evidence may evolve. The record of change may not.

Outcomes can change as new verified evidence emerges — that is honesty, not weakness. But every addition and every change is itself a permanent entry. The ledger grows. It never rewrites.

TAIL records. TAIL does not dictate belief.

No comments. No arguing. No ratios. The moment arguments become the product, TAIL becomes another social network. The record speaks: here is what was claimed, when, with what evidence, and what happened. Readers decide what to believe. Truth is more likely to emerge from a transparent, consistent process than from any system that claims to possess it.

Reputation is earned through long-term accuracy.

Not volume. Not followers. Not confidence. Credibility on TAIL emerges from one thing only: how reliably the claims you chose to stand behind hold up against their declared resolution conditions over time, in public.

A claim's resolution may affect the TAIL reputation of one identity only: the verified account holder who knowingly staked that claim. A claim does not affect the reputation of a person merely because that person is described, quoted, referenced, or attributed within it. Historical records, public statements, third-party records, and community observations do not create TAIL reputation for their subjects.

Every administrative action leaves fingerprints.

When a claim is resolved, or when an administrative status is appended to it, the ledger permanently records who took the action, when, on what evidence, and by what rule. Nothing happens behind closed doors. If power is ever abused, the abuse itself becomes part of the ledger.

Every administrative action must record, permanently: the status applied, the timestamp, the reason, the responsible authority, and supporting evidence where applicable. This record does not need to be displayed prominently on the claim itself, but it must be permanently stored and immutable once created. Administrative action appends history; it never alters it.