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Verification

What the protocol checks before anything executes.

This is the gate. Between you saying what you want and money leaving the reserve, the protocol works out whether you're allowed. If it can't, nothing happens. There's no way around this step.

Intent + your right Verification is it genuine? is it unspent? does policy still hold? Reserve settles Nothing happens no partial state to undo There is no third arrow. Every spend goes through this gate.

One gate, no way round it. There is no admin path, no account whose owner could be asked, and no fallback that lets a payment through some other way. Either the proof checks out or nothing moves at all.

The four checks

  1. Is the right real? It was actually issued against this reserve, and isn't made up.
  2. Is it unused? It hasn't already been spent. This is what stops one permission being replayed over and over.
  3. Does it cover this? What you're asking for fits inside what the right allows, in amount and in kind.
  4. Do the rules still hold? The reserve's conditions are satisfied now, not just when the right was handed out.

All four, every time. The fourth is the one people skip past, and it matters most: the protocol doesn't assume issuance got it right. Conditions get re-checked, so a right granted under rules that have since changed doesn't quietly keep working.

What the check doesn't learn

It establishes that a valid right covers this payment. It doesn't establish whose, because the protocol has no identity to check against. That isn't a privacy feature bolted on. There's genuinely nothing there to check.

This is why "no proof, no payment" means more here than it would elsewhere. There's no admin key that could push it through, no support team who could look up your account, and no account to look up. The proof is the only mechanism there is.

Stopping double spends

A right works once. After that it has to be unusable, and enforcing that is the part most likely to be attacked. Two attempts to use the same right at the same instant must end in exactly one payment, not two.

Not decided yet. The proof system, what a proof commits to, how used rights get marked, where that record lives, and what happens under simultaneous submission. If you're reviewing this protocol for security, this is the page you want, and it's the one that most needs filling in.