Party Identity — history

The dated record of how Party Identity got here, moved out of the spec on 2026-10-20 because a reader does not need it to use the spec today. The spec keeps every section spec-format.md requires and its Deleted: tombstones; everything smaller is in git log -- atoms/party-identity.md.

Decisions

Entries that record a migration rather than a turn the pattern took.

• 2026-09-13 — Insertion order is authoritative and a recorded instant is advisory, stated as its own rule family. Chose: an Ordering family, with Ordering 4 and Ordering 5 forbidding a reading or a reconstruction from turning on an instant. Over: the prose’s paragraph saying the same thing beside the state machine. Because: Operation 18’s most recent suspend is the atom’s central guarantee and it is decidable two ways, one of which is unsound — under clock skew a later event can carry an earlier instant, and two readers would then disagree about whether a party may be reinstated. A rule family is what makes the sound reading the one a generator implements.
• 2026-09-13 — Invariant 9 and Invariant 10 are tombstoned; Identity owns assigned id stability and uniqueness. Chose: Identity 6 through 9 as the single owners. Over: keeping the invariants, which restated them. Because: Authority 3. Checked before removing: the corpus cites Party Identity Invariants 1, 4, 5 and 11 — from Customer Onboarding and the coverage matrix — and cites neither 9 nor 10, so the tombstones break no citation.