Attestation

The atomic unit of QNTX. A signed, immutable claim.

The Quintuple

[Subject] is [Predicate] of [Context] by [Actor] at [Time]

Field	Symbol	What it answers
Subject	—	What is being described?
Predicate	`=`	What is being asserted?
Context	`∈`	In what scope?
Actor	`⌬`	Who claims this?
Time	`✦`	When?

Properties

Immutable. Once written, never modified.
Append-only. No retraction. To supersede a claim, attest a new one.
Actor-bearing. Every attestation knows who said it. Two actors can make contradictory claims about the same subject — both are valid.
Convergent. Sync is set union. Commutative, idempotent, no conflict resolution. Two claims aren't a conflict — they're two claims.

The Triplet (⫶)

Subject + predicate + context. The content of the claim, stripped of provenance. This is what users see and interact with. The triplet glyph groups all attestations sharing a triplet.

The Sigma (Σ)

When bounded storage evicts old attestations, they are distilled into sigmas — compressed aggregates that preserve statistical shape (min/max/sum/count, histograms, frequencies) while releasing individual events. Sigmas are attestations. They can be recursively meta-distilled.

Attested Types (⊢)

Types exist through attestation — restaurant is real because someone attested it, not because a schema declares it. See attested-types.md.

Relation to the Datom

Datomic's datom is [entity, attribute, value, transaction, added?]. Same shape, same append-only accumulation model. The attestation adds the actor dimension — making every fact a situated claim — and removes retraction.