INV6 — receipt chain vs Merkle-DAG+vector-clocks: implement or declare N/A (Lawful-Learning conformance)

[mdheller]

Source: Estate Lawful-Learning (Rev B) conformance audit, 2026-08-02 — Invariant 6. Report: https://github.com/SocioProphet/socioprophet-seed-deck/blob/feat/assumption-reconciliation/LAWFUL-LEARNING-CONFORMANCE.md

Gap (G3)

Rev B §5.6/§6.2 mandate a Merkle DAG under vector clocks with no global time function (concurrent events must remain incomparable, not linearised). agent-machine's forensic layer is the opposite: a linear receipt chain — docs/architecture/receipt-chain.md; auditLedger with ledgerRequired const true + a single hashAlgorithm (contracts/artifact-boundary.schema.json); capabilityLedgerRef; a single parentSnapshotId. No vector clocks, no multi-parent DAG, no concurrent-event model.

Decision required first — this repo may legitimately declare INV6 N/A

agent-machine is a deployment/orchestration control plane, not a multi-observer epistemic engine. Under remediation R3 (fail-closed conformance gate), a repo may declare an invariant N/A rather than implement it — but the absence must be declared, not silent. So choose ONE:

• (A) Declare N/A: add a conformance declaration stating INV6 is N/A because agent-machine records a single-writer deployment receipt log, not a multi-observer ledger. (Recommended if there is only ever one writer per node.)
• (B) Implement: if receipts from concurrent nodes/pods are ever merged into one ledger, replace the linear chain with a multi-parent DAG node N = H(payload ∥ VC ∥ sort(parents)) + vector clocks over the node set. Reference implementation: SocioProphet/prophet-mesh pkg_ops.py content-hash DAG (occurredAt "never trusted for ordering").

Acceptance

• Either a checked-in INV6 N/A declaration with rationale, or a DAG+vector-clock ledger where two concurrent node receipts produce incomparable VCs (not a forced order).
• No global epoch/wall-clock timestamp is used for ordering in the receipt path.